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Gun Rights and the Constitution

There is a ballot question in my state this November about whether gun regulations passed in 2024 should remain in place. There have been spirited interactions on the Nextdoor app, as you might imagine. Much of the disagreement is focused on the obvious dangers of guns (that the US has some of the highest gun deaths in the world, the devastating loss of life in school shootings) vs. gun rights as enshrined in the Constitution, with some claiming that the current regulations are unconstitutional. I want to examine this claim by exploring what it means to have a right in general, and then what that means for the “right to bear arms” in particular. I will set aside the question of how this right should be interpreted (does it apply to armed forces? To individual citizens?); I will argue that, even if it applies to individuals, enforcing restrictions is perfectly legal within the bounds of the Constitution that specifies that right.

It will be helpful to begin by considering a key distinction in political theory between civil society and what Thomas Hobbes calls the state of nature. As I have noted in a previous post, Hobbes argues that human beings are free and equal simply by being human. Prior to living together in a political community, this fact translated into something like a free for all: we were each in competition with each other for basic survival, which put our very lives in constant danger from each other. Hobbes describes life under these conditions as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Because this is a horrible way to live, human beings got together and agreed to put limits on their natural freedom and rights: in the state of nature, I can kill or harm another at will in order to survive; in civil society, I agree not to kill or harm you, as you agree not to kill or harm me, so that we might live in peace and security. The law then holds us accountable if we break our agreement. In short, sharing the world with others requires that we limit our natural rights.

These limitations are grounded in the reciprocity of rights—I acknowledge your rights as well as my own—and in the injunction not to harm others. In the first case, we might say that my rights end where yours begin. Consider the rights enumerated in the first amendment of freedom of speech and the practice of religion. I have the right to speak my mind, even if what I say may annoy or offend someone else. But others have the right to speak their mind, even if I am annoyed or offended by their speech. So far, so good. A problem arises, however, if I assume that my rights are more important than anyone else’s, as is the case if I speak my mind but work to prevent others from speaking theirs. Consider the rash of book bans and the outlawing of certain courses of study at institutions of higher learning: the folks who institute these bans want very much to say whatever they want about various marginalized groups but they don’t want anyone to be able to publicly explain or explore their experiences as members of these groups. Many politicians, increasingly on both sides of the aisle, call trans women “men” or use their dead names; at the same time, numerous trans memoirs and novels have been banned in communities across the country. Here we have free speech for some and imposed silence for others, a clear violation of the first amendment. And so with religious practice. I have the right to practice whatever religion I want to, even no religion at all if I so choose. But you have the same right to practice yours, even if I find your religion weird, or wrong, or silly. Because of that reciprocity, however, I do not have the right to force my religion on anyone else. Christian nationalism would thus be another clear violation of the first amendment. Teaching the Bible in schools, for instance, would be forcing one set of religious beliefs on everyone, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists alike; even if they refused to believe what was being imposed on them, the imposition itself would be a violation of the freedom of religion because of that imposition.

Our rights are also limited by the potential harms that might come to others when we exercise them. Consider, again, the first amendment. Shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire is illegal because doing so can lead to real and unnecessary harm and even death should a stampede erupt in response. Similarly, again, with religion: if my religious practices or beliefs harm or endanger others, then limits on those practices would be called for. Some argue, for instance, that parents should not be allowed to refuse vaccines or life-saving blood transfusions, even for religious reasons, because of harm to the child.

What’s true of the first amendment is also true of the second: limitations on the right to bear arms are built into the right itself because of the existence of other people. As the right to practice a religion of one’s choosing (or no religion at all) can be violated when some seek to enforce their religious beliefs on others, and as the right to free speech can be violated when others forbid the expression of beliefs or descriptions of experiences they find objectionable, so too I worry that second amendment rights could be violated when the risk of gun violence is high. Consider calls to arm teachers and other school staff in response to the epidemic of school shootings in the US. Teachers rightly have a strong desire to protect their students from harm, whether that be bullying or harassment, or actual violence—there are numerous stories of teachers who sacrificed themselves to save students during a school shooting (see just one example here). In the face of ongoing violence, and in a moment where gun regulations are seen as Constitutional violations, might some school staff feel coerced to carry a gun to/in school, even if they don’t want to? If so, their right not to bear arms would be violated, just as being forced to study the Bible would violate an atheist’s right not to practice any religion whatsoever. Similarly for the rest of us. For instance, the first time I flew after 9/11, the airport was patrolled by military personnel carrying automatic weapons. I felt the chances of harm or death were heightened rather than lessened. If everyone around me were carrying a gun, I would feel equally unsafe; I absolutely do not want to carry a gun (I’ve never even touched one) but I might feel that I have no choice in a heavily armed society.

The right not to be harmed leads to a similar problem with unlimited access to guns. They are by their very nature harmful: they are meant to harm and kill, and studies show that the more guns there are, the more harm and death there are from their use. That fact suggests that we have an obligation to limit their harmfulness. The law on the books in my state does just that. It requires gun registration to keep track of ownership, serial numbers (which may aid in identifying who owns a gun that has been involved in a crime), and a safety certificate indicating that the owner knows how to properly handle a gun; it forbids assault weapons; it allows individuals in certain roles, such as a school administrator, to request a protection order; and it allows courts to prohibit gun ownership to someone who has a harassment order against them. Each of these provisions seeks to minimize harm—knowing how to properly handle a gun makes it less likely that you will accidently shoot someone—or to make it easier to identify someone who has committed a crime with a gun. The only provision that actually takes a gun away from someone does so because that person has already shown themselves to be a danger to others; surrendering their gun makes it less likely that they will kill them. The right to own a gun is thus limited under these restrictions by other people’s right not to be harmed or killed.

What constitutes harm can be manipulated to one’s own, self-centered ends, of course. Claims about harm have been frequently used to justify shutting down LGBTQ+ pride parades, drag queen performances, and gender affirming care for minors (and for adults in some places). There is absolutely no evidence that any of these practices cause harm to anyone; indeed the evidence suggests the opposite: that lack of access can lead to serious mental health issues, including suicide. And so with book bans and areas of study: there is no evidence that reading books and studying about racism, slavery, LGBTQ+ history, etc. causes any genuine harm; at most, they may make some white, heterosexual people mildly uncomfortable. There is, however, incontrovertible evidence that guns cause serious harm and death. These examples make it clear that gun regulations are not unconstitutional but are necessary because of the shared nature of political and civic life. Without some limitations, we would be living not in civil society at all but in the state of nature, where life indeed is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Sources:

https://everytownresearch.org/graph/the-u-s-gun-homicide-rate-is-26-times-that-of-other-high-income-countries

https://forloveoftheworldcom.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=189&action=edit

Support Homepage

More Guns, More Death: The Fundamental Fact that Supports a Comprehensive Approach to Reducing Gun Violence in America

https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_9,_Firearm_Regulations_Referendum_(2026)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61593071

Banned Books 2026 – Gender Queer: A Memoir

Immigration and/in Democracy

We are living in a particularly anti-immigration moment in the US. The Trump administration and many right-wing Republicans depict immigrants as dangerous criminals who must be contained and deported from the country. As most of us are aware by now, neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security makes any distinction in practice between documented and undocumented immigrants, nor do they pay any attention to whether targeted individuals have broken any laws, nor do they care whether the individuals they target are even immigrants as long as they look vaguely foreign (which generally means non-white). Many have (rightly) expressed outrage at these practices, and many have responded by pointing out that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than do citizens, that immigrants contribute significantly to the economy while being denied basic benefits, that citizens should be allowed to walk the streets without harassment from government officials, etc. Many citizens seem to be swayed by these claims, at least in areas that have been hit hard by deportations and by ICE violence. Yet the logic of these responses is a bit worrisome; it goes something like: “they” are not the threat they are portrayed to be; “they” are actually good for “us;” and “we” should be left in peace. While these approaches are important correctives to the faulty assumptions that fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and practice, I want to ask a deeper question: what if “we” allow “them” to question precisely who “we” are? What if we hold open the very notion of citizenship itself in the face of immigrants? What if “they” are always already part of “us”? To explore this notion, I turn to political theorists Bonnie Honig and Seyla Benhabib’s analyses of democratic foundations, both of whom see the limitations of “the people” as posing difficulties for democracy as a legitimate form of government.

Honig and Benhabib both argue that the founding of a democracy is paradoxical. By grounding government in “we the people,” democracy replaces the arbitrary nature of, say, monarchy (which is based on nothing but the force of the ruler) with the will of the governed; the people as a whole decide for themselves what they want their common world to look like. The idea is that the people determining their collective fate is good for all. Illegitimacy is thus replaced with legitimacy; arbitrary rule enforced on the ruled is replaced with the vision/desires/will of the ruled. The problem here is that the people as a whole can be just as arbitrary as the will of a single leader such as a king or queen. As Benhabib puts it, while democracies are based on universal principles—equality, freedom, rights, and the laws that guarantee them—any particular democracy is indeed particular—it is composed of a group of specific people whose interpretations of these principles might be at odds with their universal impulse. Honig finds it suggestive that Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract gets around this problem by having a foreigner found the ideal democracy; as an outsider to the community thus founded, the foreigner is less likely to be biased and hence more likely to be impartial in establishing the laws that are to guide it. Perhaps because foreigners are likely to have their own biases, Benhabib suggests that only a god could fulfill such a role. In either case, democracy requires foreignness, otherness, in order to aspire to something other than mere force. The outside to any democracy is a reminder that “inside” is necessarily limited by the “we” as it is currently constituted.

Democracies are thus imperfect, partial, and in need of continual renewal and revision—what Benhabib calls democratic iterations. Consider the wording of the preamble to the Constitution: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” Not “perfect” but “more perfect,” better than what came before. It’s certainly true that the US was founded as less-than-perfect: Black people (both slave and free) and Native Americans were considered non-citizens, and women were positioned as less than full citizens without the right to vote. “We the people” thus included only white men, the result of the founders’ limited, biased worldview; Blacks, Native Americans, and women were “them,” other. While Blacks and Native Americans were seen as direct threats to the nation, women were more seen as in need of protection, playing their proper role within the nation by being wives and mothers. Subsequent social movements expanded who “we” are to include those previously excluded. “They” redefined “us.” Honig refers to these expansions as “the staging of a nonexistent right” through which “sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being,” which is not unlike the colonists themselves, who began acting like sovereign subjects without the King’s permission or recognition.

Rather than seeing “us” as a coherent unity, rather than seeing expansions of rights as progress toward to a goal of full inclusion, Honig suggests we acknowledge and even embrace the foreignness at the heart of “us.” Doing so may allow us, along with James Baldwin, “a sense of the terror of belonging, the hope and betrayal that come with the inextricable intertwining of people in one another’s live across lines of difference and power.” If we see democratic community as always riven through with foreignness, with Otherness, with difference, then who are we is a question always up for debate, for renegotiation, for re-making, based on living with others who are in effect strangers to us. Constantly grappling with the strangers among “us” can lead to asking who the heck we are and who we want to be.

If we understand that who “we” are is always very much up for grabs, then perhaps we will not be as surprised as I have found myself at current attempts to shrink the “we:”

efforts to curb voting rights that would disenfranchise millions of citizens (including married women who changed their names, trans people, anyone who lacks easy access to often expensive identity papers)
some right-wing podcasters’ claims that women should never have been granted rights
the destruction of trans people’s right to self-determination through countless legislative acts across the country
numerous states’ petitions to the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell decision that granted same-sex couples the right to marry
the targeting of people of color, regardless of citizenship status, by federal agents in the name of anti-immigration rhetoric
the targeting of immigrants themselves for removal from the US, and the horrible, inhumane conditions in which they are kept in detention facilities

These moves position women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and immigrants as threats to the nation, as outsiders rather than as part of the “we.” If we see outsiders, “them,” as resources for a thriving democracy rather than as threats to it, then we may be better positioned to contest these attempts at marginalization, to insist that the “we” be held open in the face of “them.” When those of us who are used to being considered part of “us” are threatened with relegation to “them,” the best response is not to insist that “we” really belong while “they” do not. Rather, it is to work across our differences to claim together a different understanding of who we are.

This approach makes sense of the response to ICE violence and aggression by community members in Minneapolis: they have refused the positioning of their immigrant neighbors as threats to their communities, insisting that “they” are very much part of “us.” And they have literally put their lives on the line for the right to define who they are in these terms. Their actions have emboldened others to ask who we are in broader terms, with protesters across the country taking up the banner. They have insisted that foreignness as such is not a threat to democratic community but its very foundation.

Sources:

Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner

Seyla Benhabib, Another Comsopolitanism

https://robertreich.substack.com/

https://substack.com/@heathercoxrichardson

https://yasminnair.com/category/immigration/

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

https://www.newsweek.com/list-of-states-with-proposals-to-undo-supreme-court-gay-marriage-precedent-11666827

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/12/immigration-us-midterms-trump

Susan Faludi on Masculinity and Violence

The Cornell rape case has put male violence and predatory behavior in the spotlight yet again. The details of the case are beyond horrific, as anyone who has read even a little about it knows; I will not rehash those details here. But when put in company with the rise of the manosphere and the visible burgeoning of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism throughout society and in the highest levels of our government, we seem to be in a particularly awful moment. Men, we might be tempted to say, are out of control. But in many ways, none of this is new, and neither are the proposed solutions from manosphere influencers and the MAGA right: we must, they claim, return to a time when men were men, women stayed home, LGBTQ+ people were in the closet, and white men had a monopoly on positions of power and authority. Susan Faludi’s 1999 Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man analyzes similar concerns with masculinity, an analysis that remains relevant in the current moment. She argues that the problem that gave rise to a “crisis of masculinity” is indeed tied to a loss of purpose for men in US society, but that the culprit is not women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks but shifts in economic conditions in the US and globally. If we don’t confront those deep problems, she suggests, we will remain stuck with “culture wars.”

While Faludi’s focus is on the mid 1990s, the problem she analyzes would seem to remain: a so-called “crisis in masculinity.” Concerns were raised about boys and men losing ground educationally, economically, physical- and mental-health-wise; about men shirking their family responsibilities (in the guise of deadbeat dads), boys’ vulnerability to bad influences (in the form of gang membership); and about male violence, with OJ Simpson’s murder of his wife Nicole standing in for what was perceived as a widespread social problem. Faludi admits that she began her research with a huge questionable assumption: that the problem with men was masculinity out of control, and the solution was for men to get themselves under control. What she discovered was considerably more complicated: while cultural notions of masculinity demanded that men be “masters of their fate,” there was (and still is) very little over which they (well, most of them) have control. To explore the implications of her research, she examines two main models of masculinity that have existed in the US since at least the 1700s, one based on community and social usefulness, the other based on individualism and violence. In a nutshell, she argues that the model based on individuality and violence has won out over that based on community and social usefulness as the social supports for the latter have eroded.

We first begin to understand these 2 different conceptions of masculinity through the figures of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Though Disney has reduced them to the same, they were very different men, she claims. Boone was a settler in Kentucky and in that role went off on solitary missions to clear land and “tame” nature (and fight off Native Americans). The goal was to turn wilderness into homeland, to be able to cultivate the land for food and harvest. Any destruction of nature and/or Natives (we’ll come back to the positioning of Native Americans below) was not for its own sake, but for the sake of the community that could be built on the cleared and claimed land. Boone was thus the kind of man who fulfilled duties to others, both family and community. Manliness on this view was about contributing to something bigger than oneself, sacrificing for the good of others.

While Crockett was also a settler, his goal was more killing for its own sake. He was known for slaughtering animals like deer, bear, pigeons, turkeys, and buffalo far beyond what could be used for food, destroying land and forests along the way. Killing and destruction here have no greater purpose; they contribute to no community building or social usefulness. Dominating nature, Native Americans, and Mexicans (he died in the Battle of the Alamo) became symbols of masculinity as domination and control over others (human and otherwise).

Faludi sees the public usefulness notion of masculinity embodied in Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II, and the national commitment to “winning” the Cold War. The New Deal sought to stabilize the US economically post-Depression through government programs and various regulations, including banking regulations. The Works Progress Administration, for instance, funded the building of schools, waterworks and sewage plants, roads, electrical grids, flood control and reforestation, as well as cultural and artistic endeavors. Each of these facets was seen as contributing to the broader goals of rebuilding a flourishing national community, and each individual contribution got its meaning from that larger goal.

After the War, this masculine ideal was carried forward into the Cold War and the space race. The vision of a post-war American was grounded in building a new nation out of the cooperative work of a different kind of “army”—an army of workers all aimed at improving the nation, with the common man as the foundation of US greatness. On this view, the network of workers—engineers, factory workers, scientists, technicians, managers, astronauts—are akin to the foot soldiers of the war, working together to achieve a common goal cooperatively; and communism becomes the national threat that must be defeated through this work. The same notion of anonymous, useful, community-oriented masculinity underlies this entire endeavor.

This entire enterprise fails, however, and the community-focused, publicly useful view of masculinity dies with it. Though a number of factors contribute to its demise, perhaps the most important is one that remains with us to this day, and that has even become exacerbated: the economic security and meaningful work that were supposed to adhere to post-war jobs disappeared when the corporations to which men were supposed to devote their lives did not offer loyalty in return. Not only was there no clear community-oriented good to strive for and participate in, but the means of taking care of even one’s own small community—the family—disappeared with globalization and shifting economic winds.

With this shift, Faludi suggests, men became lost. They understood that they had become diminished, but rather than examining the conditions that brought it about, they fell back on the only other cultural script for men on offer: the Davy Crockett version, rooted in violence and individualism. Faced with a loss of social purpose and standing, they blamed not the corporations and global forces that eradicated both but women and feminism, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and imaginary government conspiracies. (Sound familiar?) We can understand various examples of political violence (physical attacks on and assassinations of public figures, the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, threats of violence and death leveled at both public figures and private citizens), as well as other forms of violence such as school shootings, in light of Faludi’s analysis. US culture has shifted back to a notion of masculinity as domination and control over others. The behavior of Trump himself, and many men in his administration, embody this troubling shift: government agents engage in widespread violence against unarmed citizens and immigrants alike, and the president started a war in the Middle East seemingly to prove that he’s a tough guy.

This shift is complicated by the rise of celebrity culture, in which image and display are more important than accomplishment or hard work. Indeed, masculinity itself is up for sale: Viagra (and other erectile dysfunction “treatments”) is seen by many as manhood in a pill; gym memberships can help a man sculpt himself to look like a buffed-up GI Joe, even if he’s never been in a fight; guns have become a marker of male dominance; and let’s not forget Pete Hegseth’s obsession with testosterone for members of the armed services. (Hetero)sexual prowess, physical strength, and violence become the only culturally acknowledged ways to demonstrate “being a man.” Implicit in this notion are sexism and homophobia, with the subordination of women and LGBTQ+ folks as “proof” that hetero, buff men belong at the top of the social hierarchy.

As Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary makes clear, the manosphere embraces these cultural markers and practices with gusto. Explicit sexism and homophobia, intense physical workouts, and even physical attacks are livestreamed on many influencers’ social media platforms and characterize podcasts. They strive to be outrageous to attract viewers from whom they then do their best to extract money. They appeal to exactly the men Faludi argues have indeed lost their way: men who struggle to succeed in a system that seems clearly rigged for the few, but who blame feminists, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people for that system, believing that legal protections for these folks actually advantage them over straight men. Any man who thus seeks success in this rigged system is a duped fool, according to the manosphere influencers, who then position themselves as an alternate route to success, offering life coaching, courses, private memberships, etc., with the promise of longed-for monetary and social success. Not surprisingly, perhaps, success does not materialize, except for some of the influencers themselves.

While it’s obvious that violent, dominating notions of masculinity are bad for those toward whom men exert this violence and domination, Faludi also believes that they’re bad for men as well: they are ultimately left with only the emptiness of masculinity as public performance, which turns out to be not very satisfying. The solution to this problem is not, she thinks, to revert to the view of masculinity as public usefulness, which is based on the assumption that women are dependent and need protection from perceived threats; historically, Native Americans, Black men, and undocumented immigrants were positioned as the threats to be contained. Women largely prefer to provide for and protect themselves these days, and we have moved away from gross racial stereotypes of violent men of color, at least to some extent.

Instead, Faludi argues, masculinity itself needs to be redefined, much as the feminist movement redefined femininity (again, to an extent!). We could start by considering non-dominant forms of masculinity that exist either in local communities or on the margins of society. She sees the networks of care that emerged in gay communities during the AIDS crisis as a case in point. I think of the gentle, thoughtful, respectful, and kind men in my own family. We might also look to pop culture—the community of men depicted in Ted Lasso in the first few seasons seems like a nice example to me: they hold each other accountable for nasty behavior, including bullying; they respect women; they seek to understand each other and those who have harmed them in some way; and they support each other rather than tear each other down. These examples can lead us to ask: what should masculinity look like? Are there any features of culturally defined masculinity that are worth keeping? Or of femininity? Do we even need different sets of values, behaviors, roles, and norms for men and women? Asking these questions can also lead us to ask a bigger one: what kind of world would enable all of us—men, women, and everyone in between—to live fulfilling and meaningful lives? Doing so would allow us to address the economic, social, and political conditions that Faludi identifies as having brought us to this moment. Refusing to do so by clinging to unsustainable and unjust notions of who and how we should be will undoubtedly perpetuate the hierarchies that have been the target of social movements for the past almost 200 years, along with the violence that sustains them.

Sources:

Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Harper Collins, 1999).

Jessica Grose, “The Manosphere Continues to Devolve,” NYT, 3/18/26 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/opinion/manosphere-trump-maga-documentary.html?searchResultPosition=2)

Helen Lewis, “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” The Atlantic, June 2026 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/)

“Regulating Femininity in the Manosphere: An Exploration of Femmephobic Discourse in Andre Tate and Nick Fuentes Podcasts,” Journal of Femininities, Feb. 27, 2026. Karmvir Kaur Padda, Shana MacDonald, and Nick Ruest. (https://brill.com/view/journals/fem/aop/article-10.1163-29501229-bja10032/article-10.1163-29501229-bja10032.xml?srsltid=AfmBOooNZ07gTvr2-OuUj8Xz0wNPGQrThI9wM9OSn9ftwoFC4NqpD6w-)

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/tommyinnit-tom-simons-antidote-andrew-tate-zj2p80d89

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/27/health/breaking-boy-code-book-wellness

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, Netflix (2026).

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 6^th 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.

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.

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)