Ferguson and Puar tackle and
criticize liberalism and specifically the ways in which it works, by seemingly
taking shapes of forms of protests that are instead completely included within the range and purview of liberalism, and its transformations (as in the case of neoliberalism).
Ferguson analyzes the
African-American situation of today under Foucauldian lenses and he reminds us
that “for Foucault, governmentality addresses the arrangement of things” and then
adds that “in the gendered and sexualized context of nineteenth-century African
American racial formations, governmentality was also about the production of
things: here governmentality concerns not only the state but labor and industry
as well. (p.95)” In particular he discusses how war and sexual normativity were
tools to draft African American into citizenship and humanity.
He then posits that colonialism
never really left the American landscape and the American cities. So those
African-American social formations that wanted to be considered “elites” had to
learn normative conservative strategies that were built specifically to
regulate gender and sexual orientations and “imposing those tactics onto black
poor and working-class folks (p.98).”
So for Ferguson African Americans
were fundamental for the US state project of normalization. He connects capital,
the state, and normative discourses of heteropatriarchy. So basically the non-normativity
aspect is a part of a surplus population that capital requires, and that the
normativity has to keep restrained. So, in a Foucauldian manner, Ferguson discusses
how inclusion into normative discourses becomes a technique of discipline, that’s
why he is interested in politics of negation as a way forward, which attempts
to engage in heterogeneity as strength, and move away from static identity
constructions. I like his analysis of the connection between normativity and
state power and capital, even though I don’t think that governmentality is
labor and industry as well, but that the State plays a big role in regulating
those as well, precisely like Foucault suggested.
I think his piece ties in with Puar as
well. She writes about how US imperialism acts in contingent ways to create and
recreate assemblages that become gateways to embrace liberal queerness. Thus, she
tries to move beyond the fixed nature of identities to problematize how a body
works to enforce oppressions in order to escape its own (as in the case of
torture male Sikh body, for example). She argues that “Intersectionality
demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and
time, generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative
of identification: you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to
consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space (p.128).”
In other words, identities work in a reified way when these are used as a
justification for imperialist purposes, and they become a “mantra of liberal multiculturalism.”
I think her critique of intersectionality is very
powerful if we use it to escape fixed notions of identities that tell a story
which has no hint of differance and
that might end up serving opposite causes and are used as “master” categories
in others’ struggles.
My questions for Puar:
How can we define bodies without dehumanizing the
people in question? How can overcome liberalism to find a real resistance that
is not just a rearticulation of oppression? Is the category of exploitation a
useful one if we think about relations of identities?
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