Why Critics of “Gender Ideology” Are Wrong

There is a lot to say about the current anti-trans sentiment and policy/legal shifts in the US. I will focus here on what critics call gender ideology, which they claim denies the reality of biological sex as binary and unchangeable, substituting for it a made-up concept of gender identity. On this view, trans people are not really what they say they are; transwomen are really men, and transmen are really women. The concern from both non-feminist and feminist critics alike is not just that trans folks are somehow lying about who/what they are, but that their very existence is threatening to biological women. Allowing biological males to self-identify as women can lead to 2 problems, critics say: these folks would be able to enter women-only spaces, thereby placing “real” women at risk for sexual harassment and violence (a claim I will set aside for now); and (for the feminists) the category of “women” would become meaningless, making legal protections from discrimination for women unenforceable. The bogeyman (bogeyperson?) for many of these critics is Judith Butler, whose work on gender and sex as socially constructed has become synonymous with “gender ideology” (Butler was even burned in effigy in Brazil while they were there for a conference back in 2017). Let us, then, explore Butler’s view.

First, a note about terms. “Gender” itself has become rather slippery. Sometimes it’s conflated with sex, sometimes it seems to mean gender identity, sometimes it seems to refer to masculinity and femininity. I think it’s useful to maintain distinctions for the sake of clarity. So, I will use “sex” to refer to the kind of body that one has (female, male, or intersex, along with things like genitals, secondary sex characteristics, hormones, etc.) and “gender” to refer to a host of socially defined roles, norms, and acceptable behaviors considered appropriate for males and females. I will use the term “gender identity” exclusively to refer to a sense of oneself as a man or woman (or something else entirely) that does not necessarily correlate with one’s sex.

In some ways, gender as socially constructed is rather obvious, because our expectations for women and men have changed over the years. White, middle-class women used to be largely confined to the home, unable to vote, mostly kept out of the workforce (except in the “helping” professions), and expected to focus on their physical appearance rather than the development of their intellect or character, but things have changed (thanks to feminist activism). What was once seen as natural to women and thus unchangeable has come to be seen as socially created and hence able to change. Things have changed less for men, but there has been some movement: a man who co-parents his children or becomes a nurse, for instance, is less likely to be bullied or mocked for it than has been the case in the past. Butler uses the term performative to get at this aspect of gender. She does not mean by this either that gender is merely a performance nor that it is an insincere display meant to make one look good (as the term has come to mean recently). Rather, it means that gender is something that we do rather than something that we merely are. What we take to be simply natural is actually the result of social forces that could be otherwise. If gender is something that we do, then we can do it differently, or perhaps even undo it completely.

Butler’s example of the performativity of gender is drag. Drag queens are biological males who convincingly take on feminine expectations, wearing clothing, hairstyles, and makeup that are typically associated with women. Many would be taken for women outside the drag context. Drag queens thus disrupt gender expectations and norms, showing that they could indeed be quite different. If men can be feminine, then femininity is not necessarily tied to women. That isn’t to say that gender is simply a choice that we can make, that social expectations don’t matter. Gender norms and expectations have a social force behind them such that challenging them can lead to various punishments, from bullying to physical violence, with LGBTQ+ people of color experiencing the highest rates of violence in the US than any other group. Short of violence, consider the numerous attempts to restrict drag performances and cancel LGBTQ+ Pride parades around the country, often with the justification that they harm children. To say that gender is socially constructed is thus not to say that it is somehow unreal; indeed social norms and expectations are woven through society, in our schools and communities, in our religious organizations, in our laws and policies, in the assumptions that influence how we see someone who challenges those expectations (do I see a fellow human being? A brave soul? A weirdo? Etc.). But if we understand that gender is socially constructed, then we have an opportunity to think carefully about how it operates as both enabling some ways of being and closing others down, to ask if closing down those ways of being is unjust, to envision and embrace other ways of doing gender than those endorsed by society. This possible rethinking allows us to ask what a “real” woman or a “real” man might be, rather than assuming that we already know; it is one step toward making space for transwomen and transmen.

Critics of “gender ideology,” though, claim that the problem with trans identities goes deeper than gender to sex. At least some trans folks seek to change sex, which can include altering identity papers from, say, M to F. This move, critics say, should not be allowed. Sex is binary (one is either male or female) and cannot be changed; there’s nothing socially constructed about it! The first problem here is that sex is not, in fact, binary. Intersex people, those who are between male and female or some combination thereof, exist. Critics of gender ideology either ignore these people or claim that their existence is the exception that proves the rule: because there are so few of them statistically speaking, it’s clear that for the most part people are either male or female. This claim seems to me akin to saying that because hazel eyes are rare, eye color is really binary, with blue and brown the only “real” colors. The difference between sex and eye color, of course, is that we don’t “fix” hazel-eyed people and demand that they have either brown or blue eyes; the sex binary, though, is frequently literally imposed on intersex infants through medical interventions like surgery.

It also seems to me that on the terms of biological sex that gender critics identify—genitals, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, etc.—sex can indeed be changed, precisely because at least some of these components can be altered. Indeed, some “real” women and “real” men seek to change their sexed bodies for what I want to all gender enhancement reasons: breast enlargement surgery, vulvar cosmetic surgery, penile implants, and testosterone supplements for men all seek to enable cisgender women and men to embody culturally defined standards of acceptable male and female bodies. What we think of as “sex” is thus already infused with gender: if a woman’s breasts are “too small,” she is not a real woman; if a man’s sex drive is “too low,” he is not a real man. Bodily alterations that align with gender expectations are culturally allowed, even encouraged; bodily alterations that challenge those expectations are not. But they’re both alterations to bodily sex.

This last point illustrates the claim that sex itself is socially constructed: our sexed bodies are always already gendered. We don’t just see vaginas and penises or hormone levels; we “see” the range of social expectations that we attach to men and women. Pink is for girls, and blue is for boys; girls shouldn’t fight, and boys shouldn’t cry; women should crave love, men should crave sex; and so on. It’s not that sex isn’t real. Rather, our understandings of sex are themselves infused with cultural notions about what sex means. A penis isn’t just a penis; it’s a sign of manhood. And a vagina is a sign of womanhood. Intersex genitals, as noted above, are an error that must be corrected. Sex is infused with gender; that is precisely what it means to say that sex is socially constructed.

Lastly, let’s examine the claim from gender critical feminists that allowing changes to sex will undermine legal protections for women against discrimination. Consider the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton that firing someone for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin). The thinking is that, for instance, firing someone for being gay, lesbian, or trans is a form of sex discrimination. If a lesbian is fired for being a lesbian, then she would not have been fired if she were a man; her sex is salient to her firing. The same logic applies to firing a trans woman for being trans: if she had not altered her sex, she would not have been fired, so her sex is salient to her firing. In these cases, a person is targeted for discrimination as gay, lesbian, or trans; that does not mean that a woman cannot also suffer from sex-based discrimination. Even if a trans woman is fired for being a woman rather than for being trans, then the category of woman defines her firing just as it does if a “real” woman is fired for being a woman.

This last point suggests that both sex and gender are power-laden concepts. Rather than being merely descriptive, they are mechanisms for justifying inequality on the basis of perceived sex, sexual identity, and gender identity. Right-wing gender critics clearly seek to reinscribe social hierarchies along lines of sex and gender, keeping women confined to the home and raising children (this ideal is also racialized and class-based, which will be the focus for another post or two). Gender critical feminists, on the other hand, are also critical of this view of women and seek women’s equality with men. Where they go astray, I think, is in their analysis of social power and privilege. Sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism intertwine in the same system. They don’t necessarily operate in the same way, but they sustain and justify one another. One cannot fully understand the working of sexism without an analysis of the other axes of power. I think gender critical feminists see sexism as power of men over women. They acknowledge that other forms of power exist, and that we should pay attention to them, but they think we can analyze sexism on its own. I do not. Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are all forms of gender discrimination and are themselves racialized and classed. (My analysis thus far has focused implicitly on whiteness.) Confronting sexism will fail if we try to do so in a vacuum.

Sources:

Julian Baggini, “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism—A Review” (https://philosophersmag.com/material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-a-review/)

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body

Fausto-Sterling, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World

Holly Lawford-Smith, “What is Gender-Critical Feminism (and why is everyone so mad about it)?” (https://hollylawford-smith.org/what-is-gender-critical-feminism-and-why-is-everyone-so-mad-about-it/)

Jay W. Richards, “What is Gender Ideology?” (https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/what-gender-ideology)

Kathleen Stock, “Entering the parallel universe of transactivism” (https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/entering-the-parallel-universe-of)

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/anti-lgbt-victimization-us
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/29/1190306861/drag-bans-fail-lgbtq-first-amendment-prurient-arkansas-florida-tennessee-montana
https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2020/01/elective-female-genital-cosmetic-surgery
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/08/social-media-misinformation-driving-men-to-nhs-clinics-in-search-of-testosterone-they-dont-need
https://genderrevealcelebrations.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqiezwbr999f4iE4fCU7H8Bclav47HVBb06nmzwXxZxdIGMW0IU
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/28/745990073/woman-who-popularized-gender-reveal-parties-says-her-views-on-gender-have-change

Arendt, Violence, Power, and ICE

Reports from observers on the ground and from news agencies have documented appalling violence committed by ICE in Minneapolis since agents arrived there in late December 2025, targeting both suspected undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. What is going on here? I want to explore this moment through Hannah Arendt’s analysis of political violence as a tool of tyranny. In some ways, Arendt’s thinking has become commonplace. We can see signs of it in M. Gessen’s compelling case in the New York Times that ICE’s actions constitute state terrorism, and in the widespread likening of ICE to Hitler’s gestapo (from folks as wide-ranging as Minnesota governor Tim Waltz and right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan). Arendt’s contrast between violence and what she calls power, though, remains instructive, and I think it can help us understand why violence is so appealing to people like Trump and his supporters both in and outside of government, and also why it is ultimately unsustainable.

Arendt is particularly interested in the uses of violence as a tool in the political realm, so it helps to have a basic understanding of her conception of the political. For her, politics is not the same as government structures like Congress, the office of president, and the Supreme Court; hence it not about angling for what we call power (more on which below). It is, rather, the broader phenomenon that enables those specific structures to come into existence. As she puts it in The Human Condition, “the political realm rises out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deeds.’ Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it.” Politics is thus the process of co-creating our shared world. She calls this capacity to creatively act together in this way “power.” Her use of the term is at odds with our everyday understanding, so let’s explore it a bit.

“Power” for Arendt is not something that you wield over other people. It is not right to say, for instance, that the president or other elected officials have power and we don’t. Or that the rich are powerful and the rest of us aren’t. Power is not something that can be held by individuals; one cannot seize it from someone else through, say, force. Power is what we can do when we gather together to make collective decisions about the world or enact our worldview. It is a capacity that exists between and among us, unlike strength which resides in the individual. The founding of the US was powerful in this sense: a bunch of people with a common interest got together and decided what kind of institutional structures they wanted to form the basis of their government, and then they created them. That acting together is power. Power is thus a creative capacity: “Power is actualized where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”

Violence is thus opposed to power rather than a form of it; indeed, violence is the only thing that can destroy power. Those who use violence seek to isolate potential actors from each other, making the creation of relationships and worlds dangerous if not impossible. Its destructive force explains its attraction to tyrants, who seek to control and dominate others rather than share the world with them; state actors’ use of violence is clearly meant to close down opposition to the state’s policies, practices, and values. The violence we have seen in Minneapolis fits this description unfortunately well. This mistreatment of suspected undocumented immigrants is bad enough, and it should be condemned in no uncertain terms—ICE agents have been using racist tactics that target people based on skin color and whether they have an accent; and they have ignored the need for judicial warrants, lawyers, and basic due process. But they have also targeted people who are not suspected of being undocumented immigrants, focusing on protesters and observers who are trying to protect others from harm. The only reasonable assumption is that they want protests to stop; they want to break up the relations that Minnesotans are creating among themselves, the ways in which they are defining and enacting notions like neighbor, danger, and safety. While various members of the Trump administration continue to claim that ICE acts to protect citizens by rounding up dangerous immigrants, protesters and observers are positioning ICE as the real danger.

Minnesotans’ collective action challenges the administration’s account of the world both by documenting ICE agents’ behavior, and by creating an alternative to it. Rather than severing relations with immigrant community members, they are solidifying and strengthening those relations. The Other 98% reports on their Facebook page that Minneapolis is creating “an everyday, neighborhood-level infrastructure that makes state violence harder to pull off in silence,” which includes widespread participation in Signal chats that enables almost immediate response to ICE activity, from protecting neighbors from possible detainment to disrupting agents at restaurants. Networks of connection made it possible to pull off a general strike planned by unions and various community groups. These networks are creating a community based on cooperation, care and concern for others, embracing people in all their difference and diversity, and safety through connection rather than through fear.

This vision of the US being created by protesters and observers directly contrasts with the vision of the Trump administration and those who agree with them. Those folks desire a white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and poor-phobic (aporophobic) society, in which people see their neighbors as threats to their thriving rather than as contributing to it. The only way they can succeed in bringing this vision about is by forcing it on the rest of us through violence and intimidation. And indeed, as Arendt says, violence is the only way to stop the power of collective action. But Minneapolis isn’t having it, and ongoing community organizing and interventions into ICE’s brutality suggest that collective action can be an effective response to violence. Not only have protests erupted across the country and the world in solidarity with immigrants, protesters, and observers in Minneapolis, democrats have finally taken steps to put some limits on ICE’s mandate. (We’ll have to see if it’s too little, too late, or if they cave to the right in subsequent negotiations, but it’s a start. Perhaps.)

Action’s unpredictability means that we can’t know where things are headed—the spread of protests could lead to more extensive crackdowns by government agents, it could lead to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and attempting to prevent midterm elections, or it could lead to something as yet unseen. The boundlessness of action means, though, that it could possibly lead to positive changes to the country’s immigration policy—as others take up anti-ICE actions and arguments, the effects are potentially far-reaching. The Civil Rights Act would not have been passed without the Civil Rights Movement; violence against women and reproductive rights (well, for a while) would not have been publicly acknowledged, workplace protections from sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination would not have been passed without the Women’s Rights Movement; the legalization of same-sex marriage would not have happened without the Stonewall uprising. None of these gains were guaranteed by the movements that led to them, but they were nascent within them. (As the current moment also makes clear, none of them are permanent, nor are any of them enough to establish full equality; the battles continue.) And so today: though we cannot know exactly where we will land, without public, collective action, brutality and terror will almost certainly remain the norm.

Arendt describes tyranny “as the always abortive attempt to substitute violence for power,” ultimately impotent and futile. Violence seems effective in the moment—killing people, dragging them out of the homes and cars seems to detain them without cause makes it seem as if the Trump administration is fulfilling its anti-immigration goals. When the power of the people refuses those goals and the means being used to achieve them, however, both become unsustainable. Time will tell what kind of world will arise from this moment; it seems likely that it will be more interesting and complicated than the one Trump and his allies seek to establish.

Sources:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Arendt, On Violence

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/22/holocaust-educator-minnesota-trump-administration-ice-gestapo-nazi-germany

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5538090/ice-detention-custody-immigration-arrest-enforcement-dhs-trump

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-citizen-ice-removed-minnesota-home-underwear-after-129372047

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/17/us/minneapolis-family-tear-gassed-ice

“This Is Assault” — Chilling Video Shows Federal Agents Spraying Chemical Irritant Directly Into Man’s Face
https://www.mynbc5.com/article/cuban-migrant-homicide-camp-east-montana/70089388?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot&fbclid=IwY2xjawPfNMhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFOOUhqOFdsVHBBMW5oQ0c1c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHnsbPLH3Al7VgoZPi89IK6EsSqvy4gCJjaKtK5AItcamog8FicSuDdxxZkFE_aem_HVWRvSAgfM0mZqPsK45fhg
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1450204537151541&set=a.219620833543257

Writing in Concert as Creating a Shared World

There are many impediments to writing in the academic context for graduate students and faculty alike. For grad students, there are often teaching responsibilities that seem more important than one’s dissertation; of course, learning to teach is itself incredibly time consuming. For faculty, there are increasingly unmanageable workloads, which tends to push scholarship down the list of priorities—committee work, administrative work, and shifting institutional values away from the importance of research all contribute to the difficulty of accomplishing one’s own writing goals. Things shifted over the course of my own faculty career, including the rise of assessment reports for classes, departments, and programs; the loss of compensation for chairing and directing departments and programs, though of the course the work still needed to be done; the emergence of the scholarship of teaching and learning, which was a great development, but which tended to position research without a direct link to teaching as self-indulgent; higher teaching loads and bigger classes; and the list goes on. On top of all that, writing is necessarily solitary work—only I can do the actual writing I so want to do—and that makes it hard to maintain one’s motivation. When time is at a premium, when one’s work is increasingly devalued, and when one’s desire flags, what is one to do? I would like to propose the not-so-radical idea of joining or creating a writing group. Not only do such groups offer concrete support and accountability, they can also help us revalue our work. To explore that notion, let us consider Hannah Arendt’s work on collective action from The Human Condition.

One of the central questions of The Human Condition is to understand how we might disrupt dominant cultural norms—the operations of which Arendt refers to as “the social”—in order to bring about something new. She was concerned about the tendency of any social order to impose conformity on its members by insisting on a narrow set of norms; those who act outside those norms are often punished in various ways, both large and small. How can these forces of conformity be challenged, she wondered? Her basic answer is through collective action. We can consider any social movement as an example: the Civil Rights movement challenged racist practices that prevented people of color from living as they would choose, the Women’s Movement challenged limitations on women’s life choices, the gay rights movement challenged homophobic assumptions and practices, and so on. Each of these movements made changes to dominant cultural norms and practices, opening up greater equality for those on the margins, though much still needs to be done. We can use Arendt’s phrase “acting in concert” to describe these movements—people from different backgrounds and with different experiences came together to achieve a common goal. These collectivities created new ways of being for those who participated in them, and they did indeed change some of the cultural norms used to justify oppression, altering the broader world of which they were a part. I want to suggest that something similar can happen when we share the writing experience—a revaluation of writing itself can emerge from the simple act of working with others.

When I was a graduate student, imposter syndrome was my biggest writing challenge—I wasn’t convinced that I had what it took to do good work, with the dissertation as the most obvious proof of “good work.” I allowed my teaching responsibilities to expand beyond what they should have, taking up most of my time and leaving little time to write. And the pay was so poor as a TA that working for money was a year-round requirement, so focusing on the diss over the summer was not any more feasible than during the school year. And yet I finished. How, you ask? By writing with a good friend. We took for granted that we would get our work done together, which somehow made it seem more possible to get it done. Rather than focusing on my faults and shortcomings, I focused on writing. And thus the writing happened.

When I started my first tenure-track job out of graduate school, new faculty were assigned a mentor to help us adjust to faculty life and to the specific values and practices of the institution. This particular institution had a fairly high teaching load, and I was worried about accomplishing my scholarship goals. So when I asked my mentor how she was able to work on her scholarship, and she basically said that she reserved summers for her own research, I was profoundly disappointed. I thought not only that she valued her work differently than I valued mine, but that the institution must as well. I wasn’t wrong. While we were expected to engage in scholarly activity, and it was a requirement for tenure, publishing was pretty low on the list of expectations. For my first couple of years, I barely worked on my research during the academic year, because it really is hard to maintain your motivation by yourself, and teaching and service are very time intensive. But it turns out I was not alone. As I met colleagues who shared my goals and values, we began getting together to write and read each other’s work. It was transforming. The more we met, the more I made time to meet; the more we wrote, the more I wanted to write. The more feedback I got from them, the better I wanted my writing to be. Together, we created spaces that revalued writing as meaningful and as central to our lives as faculty.

We didn’t only revalue writing for ourselves, we modeled its importance for others, fellow faculty and students alike through teaching and public presentations. Scholarship often makes its way into the classroom, sometimes in ways we don’t anticipate, as when I used pop culture texts in Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies classes while I was working on my book (Power and Marginalization in Popular Culture, McFarland Press, 2020); members of our group frequently presented our work on campus as part of the Faculty Colloquium Series, which made visible the value of our work beyond our group. In both cases, we were able to create new ways of thinking about what’s meaningful and important about a college/university education, contributing to a shift in the institutional culture. As with collective action, writing in concert with others works, then, by creating alternative worlds, we might say, among the participants. And that alternative can then have effects far beyond the participants themselves. Not necessarily, but potentially.

We can thus understand our writing as contributing to a shared world, one that we always have the capacity to influence in ways we cannot always foresee or anticipate. Writing in concert is thus akin to acting in concert: we contribute to the creation of new ways of being that can transform the worlds of which we are a part. The stronger the forces around us that work to close down that work, the harder it is to create these spaces, but the more important it becomes to find ways to come together to create them. How we are together creates our common world. We can interrupt it as it given to us, we can create alternatives to its dominant version, we can act together to disrupt and recreate it.

Trump, Harris, and Nietzschean Ressentiment

It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump as unhinged after his recent performance in the presidential debate between him and Kamala Harris. Too easy, perhaps: immigrants are eating people’s pets? Babies are being executed by pro-abortionists. Jeez. I think, though, that there’s a method to Trump’s madness, and I think Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment can help explain it. Basically, Trump tried to build himself up by putting Harris down, offering no substance on his own policies or any vision for America under his proposed leadership. Nietzsche would see this approach is that of a small-minded, insecure person. Let’s consider his analysis.

For Nietzsche, ressentiment is about the creation of values. He attributes ressentiment to what he terms slave morality, which he contrasts with noble or master morality. (These terms do not refer to economic or social classes. Rather, they refer to whether a person is a slave to others or is able to master themselves.) The difference is basically this: slave morality creates the values of good and evil negatively, while noble morality creates the values of good and bad positively. He says: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values… While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed.” Trump’s behavior in the debate was a perfect example of this dynamic. His entire performance came down to saying over and over again that Harris is horrible, that he is not Harris, and thus that he is great. He offered no specific analysis. One example will make the point: he claimed that Obamacare has been horrible, without saying why and how, and that he would make it better. But when asked for a specific proposal, he said he has a “concept” for a proposal but no actual proposal. Here ressentiment is in full swing: he implies that his proposal would be great because it is not hers. There’s no substance here, which is part of Nietzsche’s point:  a resentful person develops a sense of self as “good” only by negating what is different from them; they do not have a strong sense of self, only a reactive one. This move defines goodness solely in reaction to the other person. In positing the other person as evil, I am already justifying treating them as lesser, as worthy of persecution or worse.

Compare ressentiment to the way that a noble person or “master” would deal with others (again, these are not social, economic, or political categories for Nietzsche. A “master” is not someone who controls others; it is, rather, someone who masters themselves). This person creates value out of themselves rather than by reacting to someone different or other. Consider Harris’s debate performance. On the one hand, she is obviously concerned about appealing to others, since she wants to win the election. In that sense, she is clearly not simply self-defined. However, she does not define herself and her positions by putting Trump down as the evil “other.” (When she notes his danger to the country, she can point to specific problems, like his stated desire to be a dictator and invoking an anti-democratic dictator like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as one of his fans). Rather, she defines herself in positive terms by articulating policy goals, such as expanding the Child Tax Credit, tax deductions for new businesses, investing in childcare, and continuing the work done by the Biden Administration to bring drug costs down. Unlike Trump, she doesn’t say that her proposals are good because they aren’t his; she says they are good because they help the average American. She defines “good” in positive rather than negative terms. Her approach suggests that she has a stronger sense of self than does Trump; indeed, she did not get thrown off by his attacks on her as he did when she goaded him. Trump’s ressentiment suggests that he really is weak and small-minded, and that he needs affirmation from similarly weak and small-minded people like dictators.

What, then, accounts for Trump’s ongoing appeal? (Recent polls suggest that the race between him and Harris is close enough that he has a real chance of winning through the Electoral College.) Part of it, I think, is that Trump both embodies ressentiment and manipulates it in others. He fear-mongers, playing off many people’s belief that some “other”—immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color—threaten their social, economic, and political standing. This tactic works because there is a strand of deep seated Us vs. Them thinking in US culture. Making claims about immigrants eating our pets, abortionists killing babies, and schools imposing transgender identities and surgeries on children specifies the otherwise general sense of threat, making it seem more real. These attacks on “them” suggest that “we” will be safe if immigrants are deported, abortion is outlawed, and trans people are prevented from living their lives fully and on their own terms. The logic of Trump’s resentful rhetoric seems to go like this: “they” are a threat; I will contain that threat; therefore, I will make your lives better. The last piece is implied rather than fully stated, and there is no evidence to back up the implication. But if you buy the first two claims, the “therefore” seems to follow. That these threats are false doesn’t undermine the logic behind them, and the logic is powerful. The same logic underlies many of the practices that have arisen in Republican-controlled states, such as banning books, outlawing classes on Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies, requiring trans athletes to participate in the sex assigned to them at birth, etc. In each case, the goal is to eliminate the supposed threat rather than address the assumptions defining them as threats to begin with. Here, too, ressentiment rules the day. Those who want book and abortion bans and so on are defining themselves as “good” because they are not those evil ones who are threatening “us.” And rather than engage with those with whom they disagree, they do what they can to eliminate them from public life. Those who elect these folks into office operate out of the same thinking: if “they” are eliminated, “we” will be safe. Trump’s claims that he will be a dictator from his first day in office and his insistence that he will jail anyone who disagrees with him work in the same way: contain those who are different from you. Bomb threats and assassination attempts are more violent versions of this impulse.

People like Trump seem to think that this approach of dominating, controlling, and threatening others is an indication of strength. Nietzsche would say exactly the opposite: to be unable or unwilling to share the world with people who are different from you, who disagree with your principles, goals, and values, reflects a deep weakness of character and will. A strong, noble person would welcome the chance to defend their beliefs and values in a public setting. They want to control not others but themselves, to be willing and able to question themselves in light of others’ views, beliefs, and values. Nietzsche defines a true friend not as someone who always agrees with and supports you, but as someone who is willing to challenge you, to help you strengthen your views, values, and beliefs in the face of criticism. Trump’s inability to take even the smallest criticism—that people leave his rallies out of boredom, for instance—indicates a very deep weakness of character and will. The ease with which Harris could anger him showed how weak he truly is.

Trump’s weakness makes his threats to treat his opponents with jail time and worse absolutely believable rather than the ravings of crazy person. (These are not mutually exclusive possibilities, of course.) Anyone who doubts it need only remember the January 6th attack on the Capitol and his followers’ plan to execute Mike Pence: anyone who refuses to support him becomes a potential target of his wrath. It is precisely this desire to dominate and control others that makes ressentiment so dangerous.

Further reading:

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

Writing Anxiety Through an Existentialist Lens

Writing is often anxiety producing. The experience has become so widespread for students that many college and university writing centers have information about how to deal with it (for instance: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/writing-anxiety/ and https://www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/resources/handouts/coping-with-writing-anxiety/). This information is often quite useful, and I would recommend their practical advice to those who are struggling. But I want to explore why this anxiety arises to begin with. To do so, I propose situating writing within the human condition broadly construed—the struggle to create meaning and to create our very selves, and the uncertainty of ourselves in the midst of that struggle and in the face of others’ responses to us. Anxiety is a normal part of these experiences, but perhaps we can be freed rather than paralyzed by them. I turn here to Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt to help us think through these possibilities.

Existentialism sees anxiety as a central part of human existence. Why? Because, as Sartre puts it, freedom is terrifying. Why that’s so can be summed up in another phrase from Sartre: existence precedes essence. So what the heck does that mean? The basic idea is that human beings are self-creative beings, as opposed to non-humans. While non-humans are determined by their essence, the kind of thing they are, human beings are capable of a broad range of possibilities while still remaining human. Both Mother Theresa and Hitler were human, though importantly different kinds of humans. These two examples suggest the basic insight that who we human beings become is the result of our choices and actions—if I act like a jerk, I become a jerk; if I act with kindness, I become kind. Similarly with things like career choices: I become a professor or a carpenter by doing professor-like or carpenter-like things until they are second nature to me. We might say that human beings are always in the midst of becoming rather than simply being who we are.

That I create myself through my actions and choices means that I am radically free—who I become is up to me. With radical freedom comes radical responsibility—I cannot blame anyone else for who I am. On the one hand, this freedom can be profoundly empowering, enabling me to make choices for myself apart from expectations and pressures from others. On the other hand, it’s terrifying, as Sartre put it: who I become is up to me and only me. And hence the notion of anxiety within existentialism: the weight of the choices we must make can become overwhelming, since our very being is at stake. And I can’t not choose. To refuse to choose is to choose! I can never be sure that I made the right choice, which only deepens the feeling of anxiety. Anxiety, then, is something like the flip side of freedom. And it is likely to arise whenever my existence as such becomes a question for me.

Writing can raise some of these experiences for us. Putting my thoughts and ideas on paper can feel like an existential commitment: I’m putting myself out in the world, opening myself to criticism. I feel exposed and raw. What if I’m wrong? What if I’m misunderstood? What if someone thinks I’m stupid? In the academic context in particular, in which thinking is the work, these are very real fears. To state the obvious, it’s the anticipated judgment that drives our anxiety. Some of us sit with that anticipation throughout the writing process itself, which can indeed lead to paralysis.

What if we rethought these experiences in light of the insights of existentialism? What if writing were not about exposing ourselves but creating ourselves? What if we saw the self so created as provisional, up for revision and re-creation? What if we saw input from others not (only) as potential condemnation but as helping us figure who we have become and whether we want to become someone else? What if, in short, we viewed writing as an existential practice of freedom? Such a shift would require rethinking the role of judgment in our writing as well, a possibility I think Hannah Arendt can help with.

In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes who we are from what we are. “What” we are is the combination of facts about us (sex, gender, character traits, abilities, limitations, etc.)—aspects of ourselves we might share with others—while “who” we are is our unique self that can only be revealed through action and speech. Part of the problem here is that in acting and speaking, we are caught up in what we’re doing and hence cannot witness ourselves as actors and speakers. We thus need others to reflect us back to ourselves, allowing us to see ourselves through their eyes. Indeed, it is only in being reflected back to ourselves that we can know ourselves at all. Knowing ourselves requires this reflection from multiple others, since different people come from different perspectives and can notice different things about us. Without those perspectives, we can seriously misunderstand ourselves. What if I’m racist and don’t realize it? I need someone to tell me! What if I’m trying to be encouraging but end up being unintentionally critical? I need someone to tell me! It’s not always easy to hear such things, but we must be willing to if we want to know ourselves; only then can we decide if we want to remain that way. Because existentialism is right: I can always create myself to be differently.

The relevance of Arendt’s insights to writing is perhaps obvious: to know even my own thinking requires feedback from multiple others, and it’s important to hear from people who disagree with me and are willing to challenge me. That might be dissertation committee members or peer reviewers. If I heard only from people who agreed with me, my argument might remain unclear, because my generous readers are filling in the gaps unconsciously. Only if my writing is as clear as it can be might I convince someone who is otherwise skeptical of my argument. But I will never convince everyone, of course. I must be able to address legitimate criticisms, however, and I remain convinced that doing so helps clarify my own thinking. This point is all the clearer, I think, when we acknowledge that not all our readers can be right. Our committee members and peer reviewers often disagree with each other about our work, and it becomes our job to respond in a way that’s true to our own thinking. That might mean clarifying our writing or our argument; it might mean rethinking aspects of our work; and it might mean articulating how and why we think someone’s point is off the mark or misunderstands us. (If, however, someone is simply dismissive of us or mean, if their comments do not help us advance our thinking, I think it’s safe to dismiss them in turn!)

If others’ judgments actually help us think things through, perhaps we can learn to welcome them rather than only be anxiety-ridden by them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that anxiety will go away, but it may be mitigated by the hope of self-discovery and self-creativity. And perhaps we can remind ourselves of another insight from Arendt: though it may feel as if who we are is at stake in our writing, it really isn’t. At most, what we think at a particular moment is at stake. But who we are is considerably more complicated than what we think. It’s certainly true that many of us project onto our favorite authors who we think they are based on their writing, but we can be horribly wrong: Martin Heidegger’s Nazism seems to me completely out of synch with his analysis of human existence in Being and Time, so learning about it both surprised and disappointed me; similarly, many fans of the Harry Potter series (including me) see JK Rowling’s anti-trans beliefs to be equally out of synch with their beloved books and are also surprised and disappointed. But really, our expectations about who they are were based on far too little to be accurate. None of us can be reduced to one aspect of our lives, and writing for any of us is just that: one aspect. I suspect that we tend to project onto our favorite authors because their writing is all we know of them.

One of the reasons our own writing feels so weighty, I think, is because putting what we think out into the world opens us up to more scrutiny than we usually endure; it is the closest we come to being in the public sphere, which is the realm of judgment for Arendt. But it is also the realm of freedom, where we can act in concert with others to co-create a shared world. Perhaps we can reframe writing as a contribution to that grand project. We can see writing as a creative endeavor, through which we form and shape ourselves and insert ourselves in a community of others whose perspectives have the potential to enrich and alter us. Writing can thus become a genuine practice of freedom, opening us up to being surprised by who we have become and welcoming the chance to create ourselves and each other anew. Thus might anxiety be mitigated by freedom.

Further reading:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Sarah Blakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

On the Importance of Equality

We’re living in a strange moment, when the basic ideals of freedom and equality upon which the US was founded are under attack from a conservative, influential, and vocal minority. This minority is doing its best to institute laws that disenfranchise people of color; deny students access to books and courses of study that challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; prevent trans people from living their lives on their own terms; and deny women the right to make their own reproductive decisions. On top of all that is Project 2025, created by the Heritage Foundation and something of a blueprint for a possible Trump administration, which calls for radical changes to the structures of government and society, and rolling back the civil rights gains made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people; it’s basically a blueprint for white Christian nationalism (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/project-2025-conservative-presidential-list/story?id=111952315). The actions and rhetoric of the anti-equality folks have been the focus of much analysis and attention (consider Robert Reich [https://robertreich.org/] and Heather Cox Richardson [https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/]). But while many have noted the problems with this moment (not the least of which is the hypocrisy of insisting on one’s own freedom while denying others’), few have offered arguments in support of equality and freedom for all. This post and others to follow will attempt to fill this gap. I want to explore why these ideals remain worth striving for. I’d like to begin with the underlying assumptions that animate our founding documents.

Let’s begin with the Declaration of Independence. In explaining their decision to break from Great Britain and establish their own country, the founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The idea here is that human beings are, simply by virtue of being human, equal. Equality is based in our common reason—we can each think for ourselves. Being able to think for ourselves means that we are autonomous, that is, self-ruling: we can make our own decisions about how to live our lives, what we should value, and so on. Our shared capacity for thinking is thus the basis for basic equality: each of us is individually able to make our own life decisions; because we can do so, we have the right to do so. This assumption also grounds the move to democracy: if we are each capable of self-rule, the only legitimate form of government is itself based on the collective decision making of all citizens. Our right to make our own decisions for ourselves translates to our right to participate in the formation of our shared world.

All that’s required to be considered equal to our fellow citizens, then, is the capacity to think for ourselves. This capacity is what we might call the positive foundation for our ideal of equality. It does not mean that we will all be inclined to think the same way or to make the same decisions. As we all know, though, inequality was written into the Constitution from the beginning, with slaves being defined as 3/5 of a person and women, Blacks—both slave and free—and Native Americans denied basic citizenship. The founders’ thinking was that these folks aren’t autonomous at all, precisely because they didn’t believe that women, Blacks, and Native Americans were rational: they thought women were too emotional, and that Blacks and Native Americans were more like animals, driven by instinct rather than reason. These people needed white men to make decisions for them, the thinking went, and hence could not be citizens.

The ideal of equality remained very powerful, however, fueling social movements to expand its reach: the anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, Black suffrage, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Indigenous People’s Rights, and Gays Rights Movements all embraced the idea that we human beings are fundamentally equal to one another; each movement eventually led to an expansion of equal rights, from voting to marriage.  These movements embraced the underlying assumption that self-determination is an inherent right.

In the face of currents moves to roll back these various gains, the question before us is thus fairly simple: are women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous people, and other targeted groups fully human? While the answer seems obvious to many of us, I don’t think we can take it for granted given the goals proposed by those who support Project 2025. To explore the question, let’s consider Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument from “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” from 1792. She wrote at a time when women were legally subordinate to men and barred from most educational and professional institutions; they were also denied the right to vote, with the men of their families seen as representing their interests in the voting booth. She argued strenuously against these exclusions, focusing mainly on education. In doing so, she directly addresses the assumptions identified above: she argues that women are indeed rational and hence can think for themselves, and that they should be trained to do so if they are to properly fulfill their social roles of wife and mother. The best way to train women to think for themselves is to educate them alongside men. Though she doesn’t think women should be confined to being wives and mothers, she focuses the bulk of her argument on their inability to fulfill even these roles well if they cannot use their reason.

The problem women faced at the time was indeed that they were expected to become wives and mothers to the exclusion of all else (well, white, middle- and upper-class women were; Wollstonecraft pays scant attention to poor and working women, let alone women of color): marriage was considered the only route to economic stability. To be considered marriageable, women were expected to focus on their looks and refinement rather than self-development. They were supposed to be beautiful and show their dependence on men through physical weakness; a woman who could attain these ideals was assumed to attract the right kind of husband—one who is devoted to her and wants to protect and take care of her. 

Consider all those period shows that depict middle- and upper- class British women as they seek marriage: friends and sisters alike compete with each other for the “best match,” because marriage is the only way for women to live well. The most naturally beautiful woman had the best chance of gaining the attentions of a well-positioned man. Even Netflix’s Bridgerton, which depicts strong and self-possessed women, makes clear that a woman who remains unmarried is in deep trouble.

Any education a woman receives here is seen as enhancing her beauty rather than enriching her own character. A middle-class woman should be beautiful, well-read, she should have some musical talent, etc. All of these accomplishments could be seen as valuable in themselves, but in this setting, their value comes from marriageability: a woman shouldn’t value literature because it will ennoble her life, allowing her to expand her worldview, but because a man might find it appealing to chat about literature; playing a difficult piano piece is valuable because a man might want to be entertained, not because she has developed her own talent by learning to play it, and so on.

These pursuits, then, were valued only instrumentally for women. If a woman values a pursuit only because it might lead to marriage, she is not developing herself but her marriage prospects. Her relationship to a man has greater importance than her own self-development. A woman is in an important sense not fully human but a vehicle of her hoped-for husband’s pleasure.

As with beauty, so with weakness, both emotional and physical. The ideal woman needs a man. She is too delicate and innocent to confront the difficulties of life. She needs a man to earn a living for her, to vote for her, to protect her from crime and violence. Wollstonecraft gives the example of a woman who fit this ideal: she was, W. says, “more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility. She thought a distinguishing taste and puny appetite the height of all human perfection, and acted accordingly,” lying around on the sofa all day. She saw her lack of appetite as itself a virtue, because it showed how delicate she was! Her physical weakness stands in for her character, which is basically one of dependence and heightened sensitivity. Wollstonecraft points out that this woman was completely incapable of taking care of her children and household, precisely because she was too tired from barely eating. Though she embodied the ideal of female weakness, she was unable to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother. Female virtue, she suggests, is at odds with women’s social roles.

One obvious problem with these ideals of beauty and weakness is that they reduce women to dependency on men and to objects of their desire rather than treating them as full-fledged human beings. And one of the obvious problems with this state of affairs is that beauty doesn’t last: a man who marries his wife because she is beautiful and knows how to please him will fall out of love as she ages and becomes less beautiful and less pleasing. What will she have to offer then? Well, nothing!

The best a woman can hope for on this view is to marry a “sensible man” who makes decisions for her but does not make her feel lesser for it. Remember that a woman is not supposed to use her reason but make sure that she is attractive and appealing to her husband; he must think for her in all matters, including the raising of children and running the household.

And yet, Wollstonecraft argues, a mother who cannot think for herself cannot be a good mother, because she will know nothing about child-rearing. She won’t be able to ask, for instance, whether it’s better to encourage creativity and exploration in her children or the discipline of rule-following. She won’t know if one approach is best for the child’s development, and for their ability to live in the world as they grow up. Nor will she be able to make specific decisions. Consider a particular example: a teenager has a curfew of 11 pm but stays out until 1 am. Should she be punished? And what should the punishment be? How does one decide? Do the circumstances matter? Perhaps she stayed late at a party because a friend was drinking too much, and she wanted to be sure the friend stayed safe. Is that relevant to the situation? This seemingly simple example suggests that parenting takes thought. A mother who is not able to think for herself will have nothing to say about these matters; she will be like a child herself, simply following the demands of her husband.

On top of that, not all men—perhaps very few, really—live up to the male ideal of protecting and caring for women; indeed, many are no more than tyrants to their wives, abusing their power over them rather than protecting them in their innocence. This fact is one of the reasons JD Vance’s suggestion that women should stay in abusive marriages has gotten so much attention.

Undermining women’s equality thus requires substituting their autonomy with male domination and control. Wollstonecraft’s analysis makes it very clear that subordination serves women poorly, by making them dependent on men who are often themselves in need of a good dose of reason, by leaving their basic humanity unfulfilled, and by confining them to narrowly defined social roles such as wife and mother. Though her focus was women’s rights, I think her argument can be extended to any other group denied the basic right to self-determination. To deny women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous people, and others the ability to make their own life choices denies them their full humanity; that may be the most important point to make in these strange times.

Resources:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/

https://robertreich.org/

The Declaration of Independence: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

The Constitution: https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman)

https://www.project2025.org/

On Love

Valentine’s Day is all about romantic love, which we tend to think of as having little if anything to do with politics—it’s about a relationship between 2 people, after all. We get a very different view, though, if we consider love through the lenses of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium and in Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” These seemingly unrelated thinkers both suggest that love is a force for good in the world, rather than just a connection between 2 people. As such, love is political in the sense that it can contribute to thinking about the kind of world we all want to create together.

There are some clear ways in which romantic love can have political implications. We are living in a moment in which some elected officials are rolling back protections of various kinds for LGBTQ+ people, and in which it is still notable when a TV show, movie, or even a commercial features a gay couple as perfectly normal. In such a moment, the simple act of loving someone of the same sex, or loving anyone a (or as a) gender variant person, can be seen as a radical act, challenging dominant cultural notions of acceptable and worthy love. The hope is to create a world in which such relationships are accepted as perfectly normal and natural, overcoming the anti-LGBTQ+ forces in the country, so that romantic love can become personal again rather than political.

Even in romantic love, though, Socrates sees a connection to the good: he believes that we are attracted to another because of what we see as good in them. That goodness might be physical beauty, or it might be deeper: we might be attracted to the other’s character, their virtues, their principles, because we see these as also beautiful. We would never, he thinks, be attracted to someone if we thought they were bad in some way—cruelty or selfishness are simply unattractive. Socrates argues that romantic love based on the other’s soul is longer lasting and hence better than love based solely on physical beauty, because one’s virtues and character are stable, while bodily beauty fades with time. A broader notion of love follows from this claim. If, for instance, someone’s kindness attracts me to them, then I find kindness itself attractive, not just as it is manifest in this one person. I might then find kindness attractive wherever I find it, so that any kind person, or even an institution dedicated to kindness, becomes attractive to me. This love is not a romantic or sexual love but one that connects me to parts of myself that I want to develop and to the world itself as it might be if kindness were infused throughout all of society. Similarly with other virtues: I might find Greta Thunberg or Black Lives Matter activists attractive because their fight for climate and racial justice moves me; I find their visions of justice beautiful, which can then inspire me to take up similar work. These experiences suggest that one can indeed love ideals and principles. This kind of love strives for the good in that deeper political sense: we long for a world that itself embodies justice.

This notion of longing is also central to Socrates’ view of love. He roots longing in human nature itself: we are incomplete beings who are constantly longing for completeness. Longing makes us strivers, always looking for something outside ourselves to bring us a sense of completeness, which is itself always and necessarily temporary. We strive to bring about the good as best we can, since it is the good that makes us feel complete. Love is thus a creative force, moving us to either create ourselves in the image of those who inspire us (I want to become kind, too, or I want to become a social justice advocate), or to bring about good in the world more broadly, to alter existing social structures or forms of relation.

Socrates did not explore the potentially world-transformative aspect of this view of love; he was more interested in how individuals can improve themselves through its force. But Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde was interested in both personal empowerment and world transformation in “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” She acknowledges that she is drawing on the ancient Greek notion of eros, but she expands and extends it to consider questions of power and oppression. She makes similar distinctions to Socrates—between the narrowly sexual and the broader erotic, between mere sensation and depth of feeling (akin to Socrates’ distinction between finding bodies and souls beautiful, perhaps)—and she understands the erotic as leading to a sense of satisfaction and completion in ourselves. But she draws attention to the gendered component of the erotic in Western society: women are associated with the erotic but reduced to the lesser, sexual aspect of it, which justifies their lesser status. Her worry is that women may be inclined to repress the erotic in themselves as a way of claiming a higher status, which cuts them off from a rich source of empowerment. So how is the erotic potentially empowering?

For Lorde, empowerment resides in the sense of satisfaction and completion that Socrates takes for granted but that women, she thinks, cannot. She says that the erotic “is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” This feeling leads us to strive for excellence, which is both about what we do and how we do it: we pursue those activities and endeavors that fulfill us, which leads to genuine joy in the pursuit. Once we have an experience of joy through satisfaction, we cannot settle for less and will demand a world in which joy is possible again and again. We each need to find what brings us joy. We won’t all find satisfaction in the same pursuits; that would be weird. But we can aim for a world in which we all have the chance to experience a deep sense of completion through our own pursuits. Lorde lists building a bookcase, writing a poem, and dancing as activities that bring her that feeling.

Individual empowerment becomes collective power when a satisfying pursuit is shared with others. That sharing becomes the basis for connection even across our differences, allowing us to pursue common goals and to understand each other in ways that might be otherwise difficult. Because we seek satisfaction together, we are less likely to accept a world in which dissatisfaction is the norm: “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial… Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.” With others, acting into the world to bring about change is more sustainable—I want to improve the world not just for myself but for others as well. Indeed, I can come to desire a better world for all oppressed people, for anyone who is unlikely to experience that deep feeling of satisfaction and completion that inspires both Socrates and Lorde.

This view of love suggests that any act that seeks to prevent others from finding satisfaction and completion is less than loving. Recent attempts to legislate trans people’s lives, to outlaw drag, to limit access to potentially empowering books and courses of study can all legitimately be considered acts of hate rather than love. Seeking to control others is very different from seeking to affirm one’s own desires and satisfaction, and these moves are best seen as the desire to control (all forms of love are also forms of desire, but not all desires are examples of love). These impulses are destructive rather than creative, and love for Socrates and Lorde is creative by definition and in practice.

So as we celebrate love on Valentine’s Day, let us remember all of its forms, from the romantic to the visionary!

Resources:

bell hooks, All About Love (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/all-about-love-bell-hooks?variant=41228396986402)

Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/608235/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/9780143134442)

Plato, Symposium (https://hackettpublishing.com/symposium)

Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (https://www.nyrb.com/products/loves-work?_pos=1&_sid=26ae32cd2&_ss=r)

On Death and Loss

My dad died, and that has led me to the grand insights that death is weird, and losing a loved one is hard. I know: not exactly insightful. But I’ve been trying to think about why death is weird and loss is hard. I’ve been thinking about Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time focuses in part on mortality as the foundation of human experience, and why I find his analysis unhelpful in dealing with my own dad’s death. And why I find Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality more helpful. Why does thinking about birth help me process death? I want to start by considering Heidegger’s notion of human beings as being-toward-death, what I find helpful about it, and what I find lacking.

For Heidegger, death is an individualizing experience, in part because he is focused on someone confronting their own death as a real possibility in the world rather than the vague notion that we will all die some day. He argues that we tend to flee death—we find ways to distance ourselves from the inevitable by speaking in abstractions—everyone dies—or by projecting our death into the future—we acknowledge that we will one day die, but we assume it won’t happen for a long time. Our culture encourages this fleeing. Consider the ways in which tragic deaths are reported: we are given statistics and numbers, as with catastrophic weather events (3 killed in a tornado in the south) or with war dead (some news agencies report over 20,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza since the war began). These numbers allow us to distance ourselves from our own mortality, positioning death as something that happens to other people or in distant places. Even when we are given profiles of the victims of tragedy, they are not meant to remind us that we, too, will die; rather, they serve to put death “over there,” a tragedy to be sure, but not one that touches us personally. We might feel a vague sadness but nothing more. These ways of thinking and talking about death make us feel safe, removed from our mortality.

If I do confront my own death as a here-and-now possibility, Heidegger says, I am ripped out of these everyday ways of thinking and talking about death. Without the safety of common notions of death, everyday understandings of all kinds of things—what I should believe or value, how I should behave, etc.—fall away; I no longer rely on others to tell me how to live. I see myself as the only real foundation of my life. This experience, should I have it, enables true freedom, Heidegger believes, allowing me to make my own choices for my life rather than allowing others to dictate those choices to me.

Now Heidegger’s analysis seems right as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes very far. It can help explain the stereotypical mid-life crisis, perhaps: someone hits middle age and gets the sense that they won’t live forever, so they make some changes to how they live. They might get a divorce and marry someone younger or buy a sports car; these changes perpetuate the fleeing of death, where you try to convince yourself that you really aren’t getting older. Or someone might make a big change in career, giving up making lots of money in order to help others; these changes require stepping back from the values and beliefs of those around you so you can redefine yourself on your own terms. That’s more in line with what Heidegger means by freedom.

So Heidegger’s analysis can help me understand what it means to truly embrace my own mortality to an extent. But his analysis doesn’t help much in understanding or coping with the death of a loved one, with the need to live with loss. This is so, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, he doesn’t see that the death of a loved one can have a similar disorienting effect as confronting my own: the foundation of my life is gone here, too, and I can respond to that experience by rethinking my entire life. Losing a parent can certainly have that kind of an effect—our parents are often considered the foundation of our lives, even when we no longer live with them. Losing a parent thus means losing a central part of oneself. But second, the death of loved one is hard, and I don’t think Heidegger’s focus on individuality can explain that fact. To exaggerate my point: if I am the foundation of my own life, why would the death of another person gut me? Wouldn’t it be easy to just “get over it”? It is here that Hannah Arendt’s analysis of natality is helpful.

In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that natality is important for at least two reasons: birth brings something new into the world, and that new person interacts with others in a way that has the potential to disrupt and alter existing relationships. How does birth bring something new into the world? Because each individual is unique; though we human beings have things in common by virtue of being human—the kinds of bodies we have, for instance, or the fact that we all need sleep—we are each different from each other in ways that are often difficult to explain. Since my dad’s obituary was published, some people have responded by noting what a great teacher he was. Being a teacher wasn’t unique to him, but how he taught, his presence in the classroom, etc., did distinguish him from all other teachers, and it can’t really be described—it had to be witnessed. Losing a loved one is hard, then, because of their uniqueness. We aren’t just losing an abstract individual; we are losing that specific other person, in all their particularity, which can include goofiness, seriousness, being principled or annoying, or all of the above. I don’t miss a dad; I miss my dad—the one who inspired me to start running, who went to all my track meets, who encouraged me in getting my Ph.D., who read my dissertation, and my book, who loved language and word play and puns, who made apple pies, who took me and my siblings to the theater and to Vermont for a picnic on a beautiful autumn day, etc. I miss his goofiness and his commitment to justice.

I wouldn’t miss my dad if he hadn’t been a central part of my life—there are plenty of people who are/were not close to their fathers or parents. But I was close to mine. This point gets to another aspect of natality: we are each born into what Arendt calls a web of relationships, a cluster of others with whom we live and share the world. My birth altered the existing family of my parents and older sister, which was then further altered by my two younger siblings’ births. We might say that birth is the opposite of an individualizing experience: it connects us to others in ways that ground our lives and who we become. And the web expands as we live and grow, including other family members, neighbors, classmates and teachers, members of whatever religious community our family may be associated with, workmates, etc. I think of the web of relations as like a spider web: the center is dense with those who are most important to us, less so the further from the center you get, where we find those who are less central to our lives but who are still connected to us in some way (sometimes in ways we can’t see). Who we find in the center will differ from person to person and change across our lives. I count my nuclear family, some cousins and close friends as part of the center; others have severed family ties and have close friends or alternative communities at their centers. Those further out could include a vast array of other people, from those we encounter at the grocery store to the people who grow our food, build our houses, and make our clothes—they are very important to our lives, even if we never meet or interact with them in any meaningful way.

We human beings are thus fundamentally interconnected rather than isolated individuals. When someone in our web of relationships dies, a connection is severed, the web breaks. The break is more acute the closer to the inner circle the person is, which is one way we can distance ourselves from death. I don’t experience the uniqueness of the those on the periphery of my web, so the loss is less important to me, the break less disruptive. I can acknowledge it without feeling it except in a general sense. The loss of those closest to me, though, breaks the web in irreparable ways, both because of my deep connection to a unique individual who is no longer in my life, and because of the ways the web structures my life and who I am. Figuring out how to continue living when my web of relationships has broken is hard, in part because the break can indeed never be repaired. I will always want to talk to my dad about the state of the world, and I will always want to hear his groan-worthy puns; I suspect I will expect those interactions less and less, but the desire for them will remain with me until the end of my days. I spent some time helping to care for him in his last weeks, and that care defined my daily routine; now that he is gone, I will need to restructure my days. Because I lived far away for many years, I have other routines I can fall back on. Doing so won’t alter the loss, but it will provide a different structure to my daily life so that I perhaps won’t feel it as acutely. My mom, though, will have a harder time, since caring for him was her norm throughout their 60+ years of marriage; adjusting to not caring for him will require a huge shift in her life. She will both miss him, and she will need to find ways to restructure her daily life without the alternatives I have. It’s hard, and it’s weird, to have to redefine your life and yourself in the face of loss. I remain convinced that such work can be done, and in a way that honors the loss. This work is best done, I think, not be turning to ourselves as the foundation of our life and away from the pain of loss, as Heidegger might suggest, but by turning toward others, not to repair the web of relationships but perhaps to expand it, allowing us to restructure our lives and redefine ourselves even in the midst of loss.

On Abortion and Biopolitics

Well, it’s happened: Roe V. Wade has been overturned. 15 states have abortion bans ready to go into effect, with many making no exception for rape or incest (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html ); others have enacted restrictions that in practice will pretty much ban the practice (many restrict abortion to before 6 weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t yet know that they are pregnant). In response to Justice Alito’s leaked draft of this decision earlier in the year, many pointed out contradictions in the so-called pro-life position:

There is very little support for children and families once a child is actually born (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/09/republicans-scramble-pretend-they-care-women-children/).

Our childcare system is deeply broken. While Republicans have begun to acknowledge the problem, they have no concrete plans to fund any changes (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/upshot/child-care-republicans-democrats.html).

The US has woefully inadequate Family Leave policies compared to other countries (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/upshot/child-care-republicans-democrats.html).

The Build Better Back bill that would have provided greater economic support for the poor failed miserably (https://www.vox.com/2022/3/16/22955410/build-back-better-scenarios).

All of these problems effect women of color and poor women most (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/05/09/the-war-on-abortion-drugs-will-be-just-as-racist-and-classist/).

Little attention is being paid to the health effects on pregnant people when abortion is not a legal option (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/abortion-restrictions-health-implications/).

These examples suggest that the “pro-life” movement is not so much focused on promoting life as such: the lives of pregnant people, of the poor, of women of color, and of children themselves seem to take a back seat to the lives of fetuses. (And that’s not to mention the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning New York’s gun restrictions, which would enable even more school shootings than we have seen recently.) How is it possible to pro-life and yet not? I want to suggest that Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower can help make sense of these seeming contradictions.

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault describes biopower as a form of power aimed at administering and managing “life.” Biopower is, he says, “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die,” which he distinguishes from the sovereign (monarchical) form of power that preceded it, the power of taking life or letting live. The goal of this form of power becomes managing the health, safety, and security of society overall, with a focus on the flourishing of the popular overall rather than on any individual member thereof. We became concerned with things like birth and death rates, birth control use, sexual behaviors and practices (teen pregnancy rates, for instance), public hygiene, disease rates, and trajectories, etc. The goal is to promote a flourishing, well-managed society that is efficient and productive through “state control of the biological.”

To promote health and safety requires managing and perhaps eliminating risks and threats to them, both internal and external; these threats, too, are understood in biological terms. Consider the rise of eugenics: if the population is to be healthy, then threats to its health must be identified and managed. Individuals who are considered mentally or physically “deficient” on this view pose a threat to the overall health of the population, because of their lack of contribution to society overall, their need to be cared for by others, and because they may perpetuate their deficiencies by passing them on to the next generation. Hence the move to regulate the reproductive capacity of different subpopulations: women of color, poor women, and women who were considered to be mentally disabled were subject to forced sterilization by the state until fairly recently; men convicted of sex crimes are still subject to forced castration in some states in the US. The justification of these practices is not that they benefit the recipients, but that society overall benefits from having fewer poor people and people with mental deficiencies or physical differences. Thus, preventing these individuals from reproducing benefits society overall, even if doing so tramples on their rights as citizens. The threat posed by these individuals is seen as biological, rather than, say, moral. If one is seen as morally deficient and hence as a certain threat to others—being a bad influence, etc.—then education may be the proper response. If one is seen as biologically deficient, however, then there is no possibility for redemption—one’s nature determines one’s lived possibilities. If one is incapable of being otherwise than a drain on the social body, then the only “solution” is containment or elimination. A healthy, secure population, then, requires monitoring and surveilling various subpopulations as internal threats to that health. This monitoring, containing, and in some cases killing, of subpopulations is what Foucault terms state racism:

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.

As the “wrong” people should not be allowed to reproduce lest they poison the genetic pool, so the “right” people should be encouraged (perhaps required?) to reproduce, which ensures that the gene pool remains robust, healthy, and, well, white.

It becomes difficult on this analysis not to see abortion bans as part of the reemergence of an unapologetic racism. Such racism requires white, middle-class women to make babies to save the nation from increasing racial and cultural diversity, even if it means giving up the hard-won gains of the past 50 years or so. The same system, on the other hand, punishes women of color and poor women for making babies, perpetuating cycles of poverty that maintain unjust social hierarchies by refusing state aid for poor families, by refusing to reform a broken health care system that makes giving birth unaffordable, by keeping childcare and education costs out of reach, all of which contributes to ongoing poverty. While abortion bans will not directly kill poor women and women of color, they will do so indirectly: the US has the highest maternal mortality rate among “developed” nations, with higher rates among women of color. (I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if arguments for forced sterilization were to rear their ugly heads on the back of this decision.)

It makes sense to see abortion bans not as being about saving the lives of “unborn babies,” but rather as mechanisms for managing women’s reproduction to further the goals of a eugenicist, white supremacist state.

Further reading:

Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” Lecture at the College de France, March 17, 1976, pp.74-75. In Biopolitics: A Reader, edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (Picador Press, 2009).

Judith Jarvis Thompson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1971 (reprinted in many places!).

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, McClelland and Stewart, 1985.

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Arendt, Natality, and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

On Legislating Sexuality, Gender, and Race(ism): Hannah Arendt and the Loss of Plurality

There are many possible responses to the myriad attempts to legislate gender, sexuality, and race across the country, including:

On the one hand, these moves seem like desperate attempts to control the uncontrollable by folks who feel threatened by anything that reeks of “difference.” In that sense, the whole situation is almost laughable—you can’t actually make gay and trans people disappear by refusing to talk about them, and you can’t eradicate racism by insisting it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, there is the potential for real harm in these attempts, harms to those most marginalized and vulnerable in our society, who are already most likely to suffer from violence, whether bullying or police brutality. People who have spoken up against Florida’s ban on talking about sex in grade schools have received death threats, for instance, or been accused of “grooming” (this accusation, if not the word itself, is a long-standing slur against LGBTQ+ people that has long since been debunked: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/groomer-pedophile-old-tropes-find-new-life-anti-lgbtq-movement-rcna23931). These harms are very real, and we should be deeply concerned about them. But there is also potential for harm to all of us: refusing to acknowledge marginalized voices or allow them into the public sphere actually makes it more difficult for us to understand our common world. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, we suffer the loss of plurality, which is necessary for a robust sense of the real.

The term plurality, in its most basic sense, refers to the fact that there are numerous people on the face of the earth; our world is shared with others. Now that seems rather obvious, so what is its relevance? Why should we care? Without the others with whom we share the world, we will have a limited, impoverished sense of the world itself and of ourselves. Why? Well, because we ourselves are limited: we each come to the world from different locations, so we each have a different perspective on it. I see what I see of the world based on my experiences within it, which are necessarily limited by my literal location and by my social locations: my race, sex, gender, class, religious upbringing, all influence how I see the world and those around me. As someone raised in the Northeast, I see “Midwest nice” very differently from people who are from the Midwest, as a mundane example. What I take to be true or real is usually the result of these limited experiences and is hence partial at best and possibly completely wrong. To understand the world in its fullness (and I should!), I need the perspectives of others who are situated differently within it to expand my view.

Arendt’s ideal is a world in which as many perspectives on our shared world as possible make it into the public sphere, so that we can have as expansive an understanding of that world as we can. We do not, however, live in that ideal. Rather, there are strong social forces that work against plurality and the multiple perspectives that should accompany it, what Arendt terms “the social.” The social works to foreclose plurality by enforcing conformity to social expectations and a narrow range of acceptable behaviors; these expectations and behaviors assume and require a “oneness” of interest and opinion. This oneness of opinion and interest is the requirement of social conformity—the goal is to fit into the dominant culture by embodying proper behavior, which leads to the dominance of one way of thinking and one way of being. Attempts to legislate gender, race, and sexuality are perfect examples of closing down plurality: the explicit goal is to keep some perspectives from the public sphere, consolidating dominant cultural norms and maintaining systems of social power that acknowledge only some ways of being as legitimate.

Consider Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, named “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents: it forbids any discussion of gay and/or transgender issues until the 4th grade, after which any discussion or instruction must be “age appropriate” (who decides what counts as age appropriate remains unclear, though the official name of the law indicates that parents can decide, which could easily mean that one homo- or trans-phobic parent could dictate the curriculum for all students). In practice, this law could prevent LGBTQ+ teachers from even mentioning their home lives in casual conversation in the classroom, and it will prevent students who may be LGBTQ+, or whose parents are, or who are questioning themselves, or are even curious about such issues, from exploring them in that setting. Preventing such conversations or explorations leaves heterosexuality in place as the only acceptable form of family, implicitly positioning any LGBTQ+ family configurations as lesser, abnormal, perhaps even dangerous. The folks who passed this bill into law seem to fully understand that this normalizing view of heterosexuality can stand only if alternative views of LGBTQ+ lives are indeed cut out of public discussion. That is, their goal is quite clearly to shut down plurality.

Attempts to restrict the teaching of Critical Race Theory are meant to have a similar effect: only those perspectives that see the US as a shining beacon of freedom and equality would be allowed a voice in classrooms. Specific restrictions include claims that some people possess unconscious bias, and that the US is fundamentally racist and/or sexist. In this case, both grade schools and colleges are targeted for regulation. These restrictions position systemic analyses of racism and sexism as unpatriotic but also as attacks on white men, who might end up feeling bad if they were taught about their unearned privilege. Analyses of power and privilege are themselves thus silenced, marginalized, and seen as power plays rather than as attempts to understand and address injustice. Without access to other ways of understanding both the history of and current power relations within the US, only one perspective is allowed a public hearing: that the nation embodies freedom, equality, and justice for all. Anyone who questions this view is thus seen as deluded or trying to get an unjust advantage over others (the language of “special rights” levied against Critical Race Theorists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ folks would be a case in point).

Anti-trans legislation is even more obviously aimed at closing down plurality, in this case what we might call gender plurality. Laws that require trans people to use bathrooms or participate in sports that correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth rather than their gender identity work to erase their transness, which positions their trans identities as unreal, or unnatural, or dangerous to ciswomen. These attempts to make trans lives invisible, or to conflate them with mental illness or willful lying, reinforce the sex/gender binary. Assuming that people are only male or female, and that they correspond naturally to masculine and feminine gender identities ignores not only trans peoples’ lives and experiences, but the very existence of intersex people, whose biological sex does not fit neatly into either male or female.

The problem here, apart from the obvious one of attacks on marginalized people, is the closing down of multiple perspectives on our common world. How can we know for sure that heterosexuality is the best way to be if lesbians and gay men are not allowed to discuss their lives and experiences? How can we be sure that racism isn’t structural if we can never confront the evidence suggesting it is? How can we know that gender identity and biological sex are naturally correlated if we prevent trans people from living their lives as they choose? The world itself becomes unknowable when it is seen through one dominant lens. We end up living a big, fat lie rather than the messy truth. For Arendt, the messy truth is preferable, precisely because it’s the truth, but also because the lie requires the silencing of marginalized voices and experiences: the lie is built on oppression.

Further Reading, an incomplete list:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo29137972.html)

Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo24550762.html)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One

(https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55036/the-history-of-sexuality-by-michel-foucault/)

Critical Race Theory: The Key Texts that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil T. Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas

(https://thenewpress.com/books/critical-race-theory)

Jack Halberstam, Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability

(https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520292697/trans)