Showing papers in "Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy in 2018"

Precarity is a Feminist Issue: Gender and Contingent Labor in the Academy

Abstract: Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, that is, the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight? In this article, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such an ideology have been overlooked. To do so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths—and the two‐tier system itself—manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co‐constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work.

Woman-hating: On misogyny, sexism, and hate speech

Abstract: Hate speech is one of the most important conceptual categories in anti-oppression politics today; a great deal of energy and political will is devoted to identifying, characterizing, contesting, and (sometimes) penalizing hate speech. However, despite the increasing inclusion of gender identity as a socially salient trait, antipatriarchal politics has largely been absent within this body of scholarship. Figuring out how to properly situate patriarchy-enforcing speech within the category of hate speech is therefore an important politico-philosophical project. My aim in this article is twofold: first, I argue that sexist speech, though oppressive, is not hate speech. Second, I argue that misogynistic speech is hate speech, even when it is intradivisional (that is, when it targets only subsets of women). This is important because recognizing that the concept hate speech applies to certain forms of patriarchy-enforcing speech is another step in clarifying what is wrong with the practice, and how bad it is in relation to other abuses. Consequently, this article provides a more nuanced account of the kinds of expressions that can and should count as instances of hate speech.

On Microaggressions: Cumulative Harm and Individual Responsibility

Abstract: Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed.

Sunsets and Solidarity: Overcoming Sacramental Shame in Conservative Christian Churches to Forge a Queer Vision of Love and Justice

Abstract: Drawing from our interdisciplinary qualitative study of LGBTI conservative Christians and their allies, we name an especially toxic form of shame—what we call sacramental shame—that affects the lives of LGBTI and other conservative Christians. Sacramental shame results from conservative Christianity's allegiance to the doctrine of gender complementarity, which elevates heteronormativity to the level of the sacred and renders those who violate it as not persons, but monsters. In dispensing shame as a sacrament, nonaffirming Christians require constant displays of shame as proof that LGBTI church members love God and belong in the community. Part of what makes this shame so harmful is that parents and pastors often dispense it with sincere expressions of care and affection, compounding the sense that one's capacity to give and receive love is damaged. We foreground LGBTI Christian movements to overcome sacramental shame by cultivating nonhubristic pride, and conclude by discussing briefly their new understandings of love and justice that could have far‐reaching benefits.

Domesticating Bodies: The Role of Shame in Obstetric Violence

Abstract: Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but specifically of gender violence. We offer a philosophical analysis of obstetric violence, focused on the central role of gendered shame for construing and perpetuating such violence. Gendered shame in labor derives both from the reifying gaze that transforms women's laboring bodies into dirty, overly sexual, and “not‐feminine‐enough” dysfunctional bodies and from a structural tendency to relate to laboring women mainly as mothers‐to‐be, from whom “good motherhood” is demanded. We show that women who desire a humane birth are thus easily made to feel ashamed of wanting to be respected and cared for as subjects, rather than caring exclusively for the baby's well‐being as a good altruistic mother supposedly should. We explore how obstetric violence is perpetuated and expanded through shaming mechanisms that paralyze women, rendering them passive and barely able to face and fight against this violence. Gendered shame has a crucial role in returning women to “femininity” and construing them as “fit mothers.” To stand against gendered shame, to resist it, on the other hand, is to clearly challenge obstetric violence and its oppressive power.

Hermeneutical Dissent and the Species of Hermeneutical Injustice

Abstract: According to Miranda Fricker, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a deficit in our shared tools of social interpretation (the collective hermeneutical resource), such that marginalized social groups are at a disadvantage in making sense of their distinctive and important experiences. Critics have claimed that Fricker's account ignores or precludes a phenomenon I call hermeneutical dissent, where marginalized groups have produced their own interpretive tools for making sense of those experiences. I clarify the nature of hermeneutical injustice to make room for hermeneutical dissent, clearing up the structure of the collective hermeneutical resource and the fundamental harm of hermeneutical injustice. I then provide a more nuanced account of the hermeneutical resources in play in instances of hermeneutical injustice, enabling six species of the injustice to be distinguished. Finally, I reflect on the corrective virtue of hermeneutical justice in light of hermeneutical dissent.

Gender and the Politics of Shame: A Twenty-First-Century Feminist Shame Theory

Abstract: 2019-02-08 JG: Author has given us publisher-supplied link to published version with permission to post to website; included in dc.internal.webversions

Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology

Abstract: This article critically assesses the different ways of theoretically connecting feminism, capitalism, and ecology. I take the existing tradition of socialist ecofeminism as my starting point and outline two different ways that the connections among capitalism, the subordination of women, and the destruction of the environment have been made in this literature: materialist ecofeminism and Marxist ecofeminism. I will demonstrate the political and theoretical advantages of these positions in comparison to some of the earlier forms of theorizing the relationship between women and nature, but I will also submit them to philosophical critique. I will show how the Marxist ecofeminist position needs to be both updated and revised in order to account for the different, sometimes contradictory mechanisms for the capitalization of nature that have become prominent today. I will underscore two developments in particular: the dominance of neoliberalism and the development of biotechnology. I will conclude by summing up the theoretical grounds on which a contemporary political alliance between feminist and ecological struggles against capitalism can be built.

Femininity, Shame, and Redemption

Abstract: At a time when some modicum of formal gender equality has been won in many late‐capitalist societies of the West, what explains the persistence of practices that extract labor and value from women and girls while granting a “surplus” of value to men and boys? Gendered shame is a central mechanism of the apparatus that secures the continued subordination of women across a number of class and race contexts in the mediatized, late‐capitalist West. Focusing on the story of Amanda Todd, two forms of shame are distinguished. “Ubiquitous shame” is that shame that accrues to feminine existence as such, and is structured in relation to a futural temporality of redemption. “Unbounded shame” is a brute form of value‐extraction that has found its ecological niche in social media—and destroys all futural aspirations.

Natality or Birth? Arendt and Cavarero on the Human Condition of Being Born

Abstract: This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof.

Islamist Women's Agency and Relational Autonomy

Abstract: Mainstream conceptions of autonomy have been surreptitiously gender‐specific and masculinist. Feminist philosophers have reclaimed autonomy as a feminist value, while retaining its core ideal as self‐government, by reconceptualizing it as “relational autonomy.” This article examines whether feminist theories of relational autonomy can adequately illuminate the agency of Islamist women who defend their nonliberal religious values and practices and assiduously attempt to enact them in their daily lives. I focus on two notable feminist theories of relational autonomy advanced by Marina Oshana and Andrea Westlund and apply them to the case of Women's Mosque Movement participants in Egypt. I argue that feminist conceptions of relational autonomy, centered around the ideal of self‐government, cannot elucidate the agency of Women's Mosque Movement participants whose normative ideal involves perfecting their moral capacity.

Being a Foreigner in Philosophy: A Taxonomy

Abstract: The question of diversity, both with regard to the demographic profile of philosophers as well as the content of philosophical inquiry, has received much attention in recent years. One figure that has gone relatively unnoticed is that of the foreigner. To the extent that philosophers have taken the foreigner as their object of inquiry, they have focused largely on challenges nonnative speakers of English face in a profession conducted predominantly in English. Yet an understanding of the foreigner in terms of the nonnative speaker does not exhaust the conceptual space of the foreigner. This article provides a more nuanced conceptual apparatus that allows for a more precise identification and discussion of other ways in which one can be a foreigner in philosophy. I develop a taxonomy of different conceptions of the foreigner, namely the linguistic, material, cultural, and epistemic foreigner; I discuss the different and specific challenges they face; and I show how foreigners enrich philosophical practice.

'Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement': How Intellectual Biography Obscures Marx's and Engels's Gendered Political Partnerships

Abstract: Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx (née von Westphalen) (1814–1881), Helene Demuth (“Lenchen”) (1820–1890), Mary Burns (1821–1863), and Lydia Burns (1827–1878). How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two “great men” to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other “great thinkers” to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions.

Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

Abstract: This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.

Survivors, Liars, and Unfit Minds: Rhetorical Impossibility and Rape Trauma Disclosure

Abstract: This essay examines how disability interacts with gender in public discourse about sexual violence by investigating the ableist implications of two popular labels commonly applied to people who have experienced rape or sexual assault: survivors and liars. Using a rhetorical approach in conjunction with disability theory, I analyze how discourses of compulsory survivorship ask people who experience sexual assault to overcome disability and appear nondisabled, whereas rape‐hoax narratives frame others as mentally ill, mad, or irrational. Taken together, I argue, these frameworks form a discursive paradox for people who experience sexual assault, specifically marking their mental fitness and placing them in a rhetorically impossible situation when attempting to disclose sexual assault. Demonstrating how these frameworks silence articulations of pain and the realities of mental illness that can result from sexual trauma brings debates about mental disability and pain more centrally into disability studies through a feminist lens.

Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture

Abstract: In this paper we aim at showing the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major criticasters of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕronke Oyĕwumi. Oyĕwumi’s work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwumi’s claims. We then draw Irigaray and Oyĕwumi into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyewumi’s critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray’s philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray’s critique of Western culture’s forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwumi’s critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray’s philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of.

Humiliation as a Harm of Sexual Violence: Feminist versus Neoliberal Perspectives

Abstract: This essay provides an account of humiliation as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself. This account elucidates two important insights: first, that all sexual violence and not only public gang rape humiliates and, second, that appeals to the neoliberal notion of resilience undermine feminist efforts to counter sexual violence. The first part of the essay provides an overview of the idea of a relation of self to self and its significance, presents humiliation specifically as a manifestation of the self‐relation, and then turns to feminist analyses of sexual violence and its effects in order to illustrate how sexual violence against women humiliates. The second part of the essay illustrates that, given the nature and function of humiliation, neoliberal discourse generally and that of resilience more specifically reproduce the individuation and exclusion that characterize humiliation and are thus detrimental to feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence against women. I conclude by encouraging feminist anti‐sexual violence efforts that at least counter individuation and at best promote collective and inclusive solidarity.

The Paternalistic Argument against Abortion

Abstract: A dominant trend in the philosophical literature on abortion has been concerned with the question of whether the fetus has moral status and how such a status might or might not conflict with women's liberties. However, a new and powerful trend against abortion requires philosophical examination. We refer to this trend as the paternalistic argument (PA). In a nutshell, this argument holds that, insofar as motherhood is a constitutive end of women's well-being, abortion harms women; thus, abortion is wrong and should be prohibited, restricted, or avoided when possible regardless of the moral status of the fetus. In this article we undertake three tasks. First, we analyze four variations of this reasoning: what we call the Kantian PA, the Aristotelian PA, the Catholic Church PA, and the Psychological PA. Second, we show how some public policies that regulate or prohibit abortion around the world are now in fact following paternalistic justifications and imposing distinctive paternalistic restrictions (hard, soft, or libertarian); we refer to these policies as “the new abortion laws.” Finally, we argue that both the four paternalistic arguments presented and the new abortion laws are at times ill-intentioned, comprehensive in nature and thus unsuited for guiding public policy, empirically flawed, or else unjustified.

The “Beloved and Deplored” Memory of Harriet Taylor Mill: Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon

Abstract: In his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill tells us that though his conviction regarding the equality of the sexes was a result of his earliest engagements with political subjects, it remained an abstract idea before his relationship with Harriet Taylor (later Taylor Mill) began. Crediting her as the author of “all that was best” in his writings, Mill's praise of his wife has not been well received by many of his readers, and scholars have long questioned her capacities as an intellectual and as a political thinker. I argue that such doubts reflect a narrow standard for adjudicating Taylor Mill's intellectual worth, and what counts as intellectual labor more broadly. Examining Taylor Mill's own writings in fact illuminates and challenges the gendering practices that have sustained scholarly interrogations of Taylor Mill and of her relationship to JS Mill. I make this case first by drawing attention to her “experiential politics” as a credible source of intellectual scholarship, and second by raising questions about the gendered aspects of how intellectual labor has been defined and evaluated in studies of the canon.

Shatter Not the Branches of the Tree of Anger: Mothering, Affect, and Disability

Abstract: Using the social interpretation of disability, Foucault's theory of disciplinary power, literary devices, and feminist literature, I write an affective narrative of mothering disabled children. In doing so I illustrate the ways in which the materiality of normalcy, surveillance, and embodiment can produce emotions that create docile mothers ashamed of their contribution to the world, conflicted mothers struggling with dissonant affects, and unruly, angry mothers battling against the architectures of their children's oppression.

Foreigners and Inclusion in Academia

Abstract: This article discusses the category of foreigner in the context of academia. In the first part I explore this category and its philosophical significance. A quick look at the literature reveals that this category needs more attention in analyses of dimensions of privilege and disadvantage. Foreignness has peculiarities that demarcate it from other categories of identity, and it intersects with them in complicated ways. Devoting more attention to it would enable addressing issues affecting foreigners in academia that go commonly unnoticed. In the second part of the article I argue that current efforts to make academia a more inclusive environment should address the disadvantages that many foreign academics face. I focus on two senses of foreigner: working and living in a country that is not your country of origin, and being a nonnative speaker of the language in which you work.

Self‐Esteem and Ethics: A Phenomenological View

Abstract: This paper aims to provide an account of the relationship between self‐esteem and moral experience. In particular, drawing on feminist and phenomenological accounts of affectivity and ethics, I argue that self‐esteem has a primary role in moral epistemology and moral action. I start by providing a characterization of self‐esteem, suggesting in particular that it can be best understood through the phenomenological notion of “existential feeling.” Examining the dynamics characteristic of the so‐called “impostor phenomenon” and the experience of women who are involved in abusive relationships, I then claim that self‐esteem fundamentally shapes the way in which self and others are conceived, and the ethical demands and obligations to which they are considered to be subjected. More specifically, I argue that low self‐esteem—which in the experience of women may be rooted in particular assumptions regarding gender roles and stereotyping—can hinder autonomy, make it difficult to question other people's evaluative perspectives and behaviors, and attribute to others responsibility for their actions.

The Shame of Shamelessness

Abstract: An important question that is often raised, whether directly or indirectly, in philosophical discussions of shame‐inducing behavior concerns whether the experience of shame has unique moral value. Despite the fact that shame is strongly associated with negative affective responses, many people have argued that the experience of being ashamed plays an important motivating role, rather than being an obstacle, in living a moral life. These discussions, however, tend to take for granted two interrelated assumptions that I will be problematizing: 1) that the subject's shame is warranted; 2) that the shame is directly attributable to the subject's own actions. I challenge these assumptions by turning to a phenomenon I call secondhand shame, namely, shame that is induced by another person's shameless behavior. This essay examines the gender and racial dynamics that so frequently intensify secondhand shame, and suggests that this troubling phenomenon, when shared as a group experience, can be morally transformative, particularly when it leads to unified public resistance to shameless conduct.

Too Shame to Look:1 Learning to Trust Mirrors and Healing the Lived Experience of Shame in Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Abstract: This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I'm here,” and “It mine” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame

Free Lunch with the Stench Wench: Toward a Synaesthetics of Poverty and Shame in Catherine Hoffmann's Performance

Abstract: Catherine Hoffmann’s Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self-abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the on-stage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which compliments Hoffman’s narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social-theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann’s performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re-weaponised against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

Anne‐Thérèse de Lambert on Aging and Self‐Esteem

Abstract: This article studies Madame de Lambert's early eighteenth‐century views on aging, and especially the aging of women, by contextualizing them in a twofold way: (1) It understands them as a response to La Rochefoucauld's skepticism concerning aging, women, and the aging of women; (2) It understands them as being closely connected to a long series of scattered remarks concerning esteem, self‐esteem, and honnetete in Lambert's moral essays. Whereas La Rochefoucauld describes aging as a decline of intellectual, emotional, and physical powers and is suspicious of the mechanisms of esteem and self‐esteem, Lambert develops a view of aging as offering the chance to become more independent of the judgment of others, especially the chance for women to become more independent of the judgment of men. As she argues, aging offers women the possibility of cultivating genuinely estimable intellectual and emotional qualities that attract the justified esteem essential for a stable friendship, as well as the opportunity to develop a form of self‐esteem that is based on respect for one's own capacities of judgment.

“The Most Naked Phase of Our Struggle”: Gendered Shaming and Masculinist Desiring‐Production in Turkey's War on Terror

Abstract: The photographs that circulated on social media depicting (and shamelessly celebrating) the atrocious acts committed by the Turkish military forces in southeast Turkey are indicative of an aesthetic (re)construction of militarized masculinity that serves as a metonym for the nation‐state. As violence is aestheticized in a gendered fashion in these depictions, the Kurdish resistance movement is shamed as feminine. Gendered shaming, in this context, conjoins racialization and gendering as subjugating mechanisms of the state. Women's peace movements seek to disrupt this heteropatriarchal logic of the state by countering the tripartite alignment of masculinity‐power‐domination with politicized art. In refusing the shame attributed to femininity, the shame that the state desires the Kurdish body to signify, they transfigure shame into honor and resistance.

“I longed to cherish mirrored reflections”: Mirroring and Black Female Subjectivity in Carrie Mae Weems's Art against Shame

Abstract: Through staged photographs in which she herself is often the lead actor or through appropriation of historical photographs, contemporary African American artist Carrie Mae Weems deconstructs the shaming of the black female body in American visual culture and offers counter‐hegemonic images of black female beauty. The mirror has been foundational in Western theories of subjectivity and discussions of beauty. In the artworks I analyze in this article, Weems tactically employs the mirror to engage the topos of shame in order to reject it as a way of seeing the self and to offer a new way of lovingly seeing the self. I use the work of Kelly Oliver, Helen Block Lewis, and bell hooks to articulate the relationships among the mirror, shame, and black female subjectivity in Weems's work. Weems's subjects often reckon with what Oliver calls “social melancholy” as they experience shame while standing before the mirror. However, Weems also shows that by looking again—a critical strategy I explain using Oliver's model of “the loving eye”—her subjects can use the mirror as a corrective to the social shaming gaze and make it a stage for establishing black female subjectivity, a gaze of self‐love, and beauty.

Resisting the Logic of Ambivalence: Bad Faith as Subversive, Anticolonial Practice

Abstract: This article critiques Homi Bhabha's proposal that mimicry, as a transgressive performance of ambivalence, disrupts the colonial violence of the stereotype, and as such, generates emancipatory conditions for postcolonial subjects. I am critical of this naming of mimicry as enabling a possible liberation from colonial violence not only because it fails to address the loss of belonging that significantly marks the experience of being so violated, but also because it seems to intensify this loss in the hybridity and fragmentation that it celebrates. Through the work of Maria Lugones and Mariana Ortega, I propose a reimagined sense of Sartrean bad faith as one that corrects for this failure. This account of bad faith—as subversive, anticolonial practice—legitimizes my longing for a stability made impossible by the violent ambivalence that pervades both the colonial and postcolonial condition. Lugones's accounts of multiplicity and ontological plurality, as well as Ortega's conception of hometactics, help me argue that this reimagined conception of bad faith ought to be considered productive when it comes to existential strategies that pursue the possibility of free black life.