There is a dangerous quality to a group of people whose identities are based on doing good in the world. Especially when that group is largely unable or unwilling to engage in critical analysis of their methods, values, their language, their culture. As a budding intellectual in the university setting, I have accumulated a set of tools to understand the meaning making processes and power structures existing in leftist, intersectional social justice culture. Rather than replicate the elitism that academics visit upon minoritized communities, I employ these as tools to analyze the performativity of social justice work in order to shift its foci as a political project.
In “On the Political Responsibilities of Cultural Studies,” Lawrence Grossberg imagines the role of the Cultural Studies scholar as one of beginnings and openness; “ to tell better stories about what’s going on, and to begin to enable imagining new possibilities” (241). In this way, the intellectual is a spirited storyteller, constantly taking material from a variety of sources of knowledge and crafting from them a multitude of narratives world-changers to choose from. It is also the task of the scholar to “[reject] all forms of simplification and reduction, and [embrace] the complexity, contradiction and contingency of the world” (241). The intellectual embraces the difficulty of unknowing while pushing forward in thought and action and research, never seeking the comfort of widely accepted claims and understandings. Their responsibility to the world is great; Cultural Studies is inherently political, as the project is to uncover locations of power and control.
Building upon Grossberg’s vision of Cultural Studies clearing space for new possibilities, J.K. Gibson-Graham in their introduction of A Postcapitalist Politics invites a secondary identity alongside the intellectual: “theorists of possibility” (xxviii). Theorists of possibility cultivate an open method of thinking that theorize new futures into being. They rely on the concept of a “politics of possibility” to unhinge the notion that there exists a single power structure that govern the world immutably completely (xxxiii). They happily replace the anxiety of bumping against the edges of what is known with curiosity and creativity. The role of the intellectual is to cultivate this habit of moving away from culturally recognizable thought into unfamiliar terrains. Intellectuals who are invested in changing the world must adopt this mode of thinking, and also convince others to move away from common sense thinking.
For Edward Said, the intellectual is someone “endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (11). Thus, the role of the intellectual is bestowed upon themselves, and they must answer the call to use their skillset of representing a standpoint to promote universal principles of truth and freedom, however inconvenient or opposing to the ruling class the message may be. Intellectuals are not produced by academies, but rather emerge from a variety of knowledges. There is a personal sacrifice and regular exposure to risk that Said’s intellectual willingly takes on in order to demonstrate the purity of their cause.
In a conversation between Foucault and Deleuze, the two philosophers discuss the historical role of the intellectual in speaking the truth when mass communication channels were state-controlled during times of social unrest. Foucault suggests that that this is no longer a valid role of the intellectual, as the masses possess inherent truths about their own oppressions: “they know far better than [the intellectual] and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves” (207). Rather, the role of the intellectual has shifted to a responsibility of undermining their valorized position within political discourse. Their project is to undo their historically constructed identity as society’s heroes, standalone champions of truth and consciousness. This necessitates a movement away from the individual as a knowledge producer, and towards the masses in taking back power from hidden sources.
I am a new Cultural Studies scholar situated in a young community that practices queer separatism, anti-capitalist sentiments, and anti-oppression social justice activism. Throughout this quarter, when absorbing the course texts, the questions reflected back at me were: how can I apply these theories to my role as a member of my specific community? How can I bring this knowledge back and use it expand conversation? How can my experiences and learnings in the academy be repossessed and used by the community? Since coming into this community, I have entangled myself with other activists in a leftist political group identity. I can no longer see my life as completely my own. In stating solidarity with minoritized groups in the city and nation, my individual actions cannot exist within a vacuum. This is the dogma of social justice activism I have absorbed from working with other activists.
Before even beginning to sketch out answers, I acknowledge my struggle with the legitimacy of my position as a person with the class privilege to consider, be accepted into, and attend graduate school while holding a traditional professional career. Are lived experiences a prerequisite for theorizing on issues of oppression and the ways out? I am also a non-Black person of color; my Chinese Americanness grants me specific, conditional privileges when moving through a white supremacist society. Am I allowed to speak or critique? Who is allowed to theorize? Is it valid to stand on my platform of queer and trans identity to speak to or for other sorts of “others”?
If I cannot theorize, then I cannot speak. If I cannot speak, then I cannot act. If I cannot act, then I cannot be an engaged member of my community. I move away from silencing myself, and instead, open up my stance to being critiqued by others with different knowledges. My particular role as a public intellectual in my community of the dispossessed is to offer up theories and theorizing as additional practices for extending our liberation practices. In echoing Foucault, my role as a visiting university infiltrator is to do work to demolish the distinction between traditional scholar and activist. Instead of hiding within the academy and assimilating into its culture of exclusivity, my role is to steal as much as I can from the university and offer resources and tactics back to the community. My hope is to combat the myth of academic theory as totally inaccessible to social movements. Deleuze, and Moten and Harney all refer to theories as merely one tool in an assorted toolbox. If a theory can be put on as “a pair of glasses directed to the outside,” then use the theory for as long as it helps you identify what you are trying to understand (208).
Now that I have established the validity and necessity of my role in aiding in transformation within the community I am situated within, I will begin with a discussion of the active process of culture-making and power of norms, as presented by Hall in R epresentations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practice. Through this framework, I will attempt to delineate the role of performativity in current social justice activist culture, and then critique the ways it is detrimentally contradictory, and restrains itself from reaching for its stated goals.
In Representations, Hall highlights the necessity of naming representation as a key process in Cultural Studies. Representation is the constructed relationship between things, concepts, and signs through language. There is a network of codes that link concepts and the signs that represent them. It is a widespread acceptance of these codes that allow people to communicate with each other in seemingly natural ways. Social convention dictates a shared interpretation of concepts between individuals and groups participating in a shared culture. The idea that culture and meaning are fixed and existing on a plane of right or wrong is an illusion.
In this paper, I am defining social justice culture in present day as upholding attitudes that are leftist, anti-oppressive, anti-racist, supportive of queer and transgender identities, pro-life, pro-immigrant, pro-marginalized positions. having a starting point of categorizing and segregating individuals on the basis of identities: race, gender presentation, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, to name a few. The community consists of individuals, groups and organizations who are responding to structural oppressions in their lives or in the lives of their community members through political organizing, the forms of which vary widely from direct action to interpersonal relations. There is a shared understanding of being born into an unjust society that follows an invisible set of rules to allocates resources to some, while withholding from and violently taking from others. In this way, social justice culture aligns with the project of Cultural Studies in uncovering and publicly naming obscured systems of power.
The goals of this community may include a bringing about a socialist revolution, prison abolition, legal institution of queer and transgender rights, dismantling anti-black racism, combating gentrification within cities, and diversifying representation and support of minoritized identities in workplaces. Mainstream social justice discourse is heavily influenced by the theories of first world feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, and local grassroots organizing. Local Seattle non-profit organizations and informal groups existing in this space are Social Justice Fund, API Chaya, Anakbayan Seattle, Gay City, Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites, European Dissent, and Got Green. The locations of this community are dispersed between the physical (densely populated, liberal cities) and the virtual (online discussion and publishing spaces).
Within a Cultural Studies framework, anti-oppression social justice culture is a particular way of being politicized in a specific time and place. There is no inherent permanence or rightness about it. It would be ignorant to propose that it represents a new mode of resistance in a new age of crisis, as it is but one formation in a legacy of the longstanding and complex past Black, feminist, indigenous, and university student struggles against dominant powers in the western world. Raymond Williams coined the phrase “structure of feeling” to describe a shared experience in a specific community that requires no explanation because it is so apparent (42). Its existence is beyond words, it is an undeniable feeling of understanding and familiarity. Within this community, there are acceptable and unacceptable ways of acting. I argue that the “structure of feeling” in social justice culture is both intoxicating and derailing, demanding a physical devotion that is separate from doing political work.
What constitutes social justice culture, and in what ways is it reproduced? I argue that much of modern day social justice culture is steeped in the performance of doing. A performance is made up of scripts, rehearsals, actors and audiences. When performing good is the basis for a personal political identity, the ability to distinguish between practice, self, group, and theory is lost. Social justice work, then, demands a constant public doing and improvement. This expectation produces an underlying anxiety for learning to become a skillful actor of goodness and radicalness. Proponents of social justice are expected to continually display authentic investment in group ideologies to maintain their conditional group political identity.
In the personal essay “The Queer Poor Aesthetic” published in The Hye-Phen magazine, the trans of color author narrates their experience living with class-privileged queer and trans roommates who hid their material wealth by adopting typical behaviors of impoverished millennials, such as dumpster diving for food and complaining about not having money. When the author tried to confront their roommates about their false performance and demanded an accounting of their class privilege, none was given. The author’s conclusion is that those white-passing, poor-passing queers are enacting harm against actually marginalized queer people through their presentations, and because of this, they are wrong and immoral. The essay ends with this firm judgment, and a general call to readers to “[be] honest about ourselves, our privilege, and our politics” (Mujikian, 2016). Without attempting to take sides in this particular story, we can investigate possible reasons why this script is so prominent in social justice performance. It appears to stem from the combination of good intentions and incomplete theory to produce unexpected outcomes. In J. K. Gibson-Graham’s interpretation of Saul Newman’s article “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” highlights the development of a moralistic stance in leftist politics when dealing with relations to power. Note the key statement: “Distance from power is the marker of authentic radicalism and desire is bound up in the purity of powerlessness” (6). If we agree with Newman’s assessment, then the performativity of social justice and normalization of harsh personal critique is a direct reaction to fear of group rejection, which has little to do with the project of dismantling structural inequality.
The grand (and frankly, shallowly defined) ideals of freedom, anti-oppression, and equality are available to be wielded as weapons against the individual actor or group. When members of oppressed groups name oppressive behaviors of a member or members, it is referred to as a call out. Because the journey of political work and personal transformation is a winding path, steps outside of the cultural norm are subject to intense criticism. Within the discourse of social justice, the language of improvement is regularly used to discipline members of the group. There is rarely discussion about realistic levels of personal involvement and sacrifice, which leaves the door open for critiquing lack of perceived engagement and sacrifice. There is a bizarre reversal of ideals and behavior: often times, the judgment doled out from one activist to another activist is much more severe than the kind of engagement between an activist and a member of the general population who is not aligned in shared goals and values. For example, a queer person of color publicly shames another queer person of color in community for exhibiting traditionally masculine behaviors, while refraining to confront their cis white male coworker for their sexist behaviors.
Let me return to address my own agitation and uncertainty in writing this topic. The current discourse of social justice culture centers around lived experiences, but only when they arise from marginalized locations. This discourse is meant to create space for untold stories, yet also effectively serves to silence those with perceived race and gender privilege. What does it mean to value certain groups of people solely because of their oppressed, unprivileged positions? Because of the discourse of privilege and oppression, judgments of individual identities are constantly being used as currency to grant or deny access in community spaces and platforms. This has resulted in a standard confession of privileges when introducing oneself, which is a performance of anti-oppression. For people who identify as queer radicals, customary introductions include their gender pronouns, and their identities. For example, my standard introduction in leftist queer spaces is “I’m Frances, my pronouns are they and them, and I’m a queer trans Chinese American.” From this statement, the listener can construct a representation of my levels of privilege and legitimacy, which informs how they choose to interact with me. My gender and racial non-privilege in larger society grants me a reverse orientation of subprivilege in the social justice community, where my outsider status is a norm. However, what can be said about the marginalized that does not rely on their marginalized status as the basis for acceptance? This is assigning value to marginalized people largely based on their positioning to the cis white heteropatriarchy. By this logic, marginalized people are always right, and privileged people are always wrong. Are we not also devaluing marginalized groups by the refusal to acknowledge other reasons for listening to them?
In Andrea Smith’s blog post, “The Problem with ‘Privilege’”, she makes the keen observation that confessions of privilege come from an individual standpoint, while social justice activists are in stated opposition to structural inequality. This difference in scale between a stated problem and a proposed solution is remarkable. Smith concludes that the act of naming privileges, initially intended to draw renewed attention to well-hidden structures of domination, eventually “became the political project themselves” (Smith, 2013). The gravity attached to this individualized practice runs contrary to the stated belief that collective action is the vehicle for social transformation. The insistence on centering privilege in interpersonal relationships has resulted in a host of extraneous ongoing conflicts in social justice communities. For example, over the past several years, with the mainstreaming of social justice ideas in the media, the catchphrases “ kill all men ”, “ die cis scum” and “fuck white people” and their various counterparts have proliferated on the internet. While many of these sentiments are a result of exploded frustration at the daily experiences of violence in a patriarchal, heterosexist, white supremacist society, this language introduces a hostile “us versus them” framework in the social justice discourse of gender, sexual, and racial identity. When performing political work, it has become an acceptable reason to not interacting with someone simply because they are male, cisgender, or white. Again, the segregation and denigration of people via their identities in social justice work is antithetical to collective action.
This morality, even condescension, of social justice culture is commonly replicated through the publication and sharing of internet essays about how to be a better person through a lens of anti-oppression. A prominent site that produces this form of knowledge is the intersectional feminist website, Everyday Feminism. According to their Our Vision page, the site receives “4.5 million monthly visitors from over 150 countries” (Everyday Feminism, 2016). All of their articles follow a standard structure: A How To title, list of problematic or suggested behaviors, bolded claims, and an ending statement of hard opinion. Titles of recently published articles include “5 Oppressive Tactics We Need to Stop Using in Our Anti-Oppression Work” , “Why Disability Activism Needs to Be More Inclusive of People of Color” , “6 Helpful Ways to Check Your Male Privilege in Gender Neutral Bathrooms”. The titles, the educational tone of the writing, and the prescriptive checklists contribute to creating the idea that there is only one way to think about and do social justice. The smugness in how Everyday Feminism organizes and promotes its ideology of anti-oppression is troubling. In trying to liberate readers from the legitimately oppressive structures, they are replacing them with equally restrictive orthodoxy on the other end of the political spectrum.
What are alternatives to the discourse of privilege, call out culture, widely prescribing behaviors, and the intense focus on a performance of good? Bringing it back to the original prompt, it is the role of the intellectual not merely critique and illustrate known problems, but to enable the imaginative conditions for new possibilities. Personally, my role as an intellectual activist is to constantly challenge the politics of social justice, to notice when the application of theory becomes contradictory, and to keep asking questions, even at the expense of my social standing within the social community. The work of social justice extends before and beyond lifetimes. Rather than succumb to the idea that every moment is a crisis, social justice activists are invited to use theory as a tool to cultivate a way of thinking that examines social problems from a variety of positions, combinations, and meanings. To borrow from Jack Halberstam’s introduction to The Undercommons, we would do well to enter a separate mode of thinking that “prepares us to be embedded in what Harney calls “the with and for” and allows you to spend less time an-tagonized and antagonizing” (11). I believe this is the task of the Cultural Studies scholar- to push through into the spaces of lack to create shared visions of a world to definitively fight for.
Everyday Feminism (2016). Our Vision. Retrieved from http://everydayfeminism.com/about-ef/our-vision/
Foucault, Michel, and Gilles Deleuze (1977). “Intellectuals and Power.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Grossberg, Lawrence (2010). “On the political responsibilities of cultural studies”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 11: 2, 241 — 247.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hall, Stuart (1997). Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practice. London: Sage Publications.
Mujikian, Shak’ar (2016). The Queer Poor Aesthetic [Blog Post]. Retrieved from
http://www.the-hye-phen-mag.org/2016/09/10/the-queer-poor-aesthetic/
Said, Edward (1996). Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books. Williams, Raymond (1961). The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Smith, Andrea (2013). The Problem With “Privilege” [Blog Post]. Retrieved from
https://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/