theory

jujutsu-with-zizek:

Zizek on redemption through perversion:

A profoundly religious friend once commented on the subtitle of a book of mine, “the perverse core of Christianity”: “I fully agree with you there! I believe in God but I find repulsive all the twists celebrating sacrifice and humiliation, redemption through suffering, God organizing his own son’s killing by men. Can’t we have Christiantiy without this perverse core?” I could not bring myself to answer him: “But that is precisely the point of my book: what I want is all those perverse twists of redemption through suffering, the death of God, etc., but without God!”

(excerpted from “Less Than Nothing”, 2012)

(art by Joseph Whiting Stock)

jujutsu-with-zizek:

Zizek on how the subject grounds its ethics in nothingness:

In Revolutionary Terror, the singular consciousness experiences the destructive consequences of keeping itself separate from the universal substance: in such a separation substance appears as a negative power which arbitrarily annihilates every singular consciousness. The positive outcome of the Terror is that, in the subject’s very annihilation, the subject reaches its ground, finds its place in the ethical substance.

(from: “Less Than Nothing”, 2012)

(art by jasper-raymond-rand)

lilpinkelectricchair:

Louise Bourgeois,Little Girl(1968)

sydnormonster:

I found this picture in several article on the Prop 8 ruing that came today and I couldn’t think of a better visual example to represent Puar’s concept of homonationalism.

Homonationalism functions in complementary ways to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which describes how the West produces knowledge and dominates ‘the Orient’ through academic, cultural and discursive processes.[4] Like Orientalism, homonationalism speaks to the ways Western powers (such as the U.S. and Canada) circulate ideas about other cultures (like Arab and Islamic cultures) in order produce the West as culturally, morally, and politically advanced and superior. However, unlike Orientalism, homonationalism speaks particularly to the way gender and sexual rights discourses become central to contemporary forms of Western hegemony.

Jasbir Puar coined the term homonationalism in 2007 with the publication of her book,Terrorist Assemblages[5]. A coupling of Lisa Duggan’s concept of homonormativity[6] and a poststructural critique of nationalism, homonationalism is at once a description of contemporary racial and economic relations in Western sexual rights discourses and an explanation of global narratives around sexual human rights, immigration and democracy. Homonationalism couples the idea of normative claims from homosexual subjects into state inclusion with mobilizations of liberal and normative sexual minorities as exceptional subjects in the state in opposition to queer deviants. Put more simply, homonationalism is the process where some queers (mostly upper-middle-class and rich gay men and women) gain acceptance and status in Canadian (or American) society through consumerism, economic mobility, and the securing of individual rights, such as gay marriage. By appealing to the rights of the individual (rather than collective rights) and turning to the state for inclusion instead of mobilizing in opposition to the state, we have entered into an era where some queers have gained admission into the dominant social, political, and economic order.

This is not to say that public and private institutions are now spaces of liberation for gender and sexuality. If anything, homophobia, sexism, misogyny, transphobia and other forms of gendered subjugation are often insidious rather than overt, particularly when the language of rights is being used. The inclusion of some sexual minorities into the fold acts as a screen to draw attention away from the continued asymmetrical conditions that structure our current social, political, and economic context. Ironically, the inclusion of normative sexual subjects is contingent on the maintenance of heteronormative standards; so gays can be just like straight people, as long as they don’t rock the patriarchal boat. This process also erases how any achieved rights have come through collective struggles on the part of the subjugated, rather than through the benevolence of the nation. Homonationalism offers a critical lens that reveals how this process happens, and what else it produces, by demonstrating how some queers have been able to gain a conditional inclusion into Canadian culture by making sexual rights complicit with neoliberal demands for free markets, individualism, and Western moral superiority.

How homonationalism works: 

1)    The Inclusion Argument: Sexual minorities should call for inclusion in the state through liberal rights of the individual (e.g. gay marriage). The struggle for individual rights replaces the struggle for collective rights, collective resistance, or the transformation of asymmetrical power formations.

2)    Good vs. Bad Queers: The call for inclusion is predicated on making the distinction between good queers and bad queers. These appeals argue that most sexual minorities are no different than members of dominant society, and thus that these queers deserve to be recognized as part of the mainstream. Here, bad queers are offered as the undesirable other to help sell the good queers to [western] society, since bad queers are dangers to society or drains on state resources. They include racialized queers, people who are HIV-positive, poor and homeless queers, drug users, non-status queer migrants, etc.

3)    Reinforcing the Social Order: Once the right kind of queers are welcomed into the state, these institutions can use the newly admitted ‘good queers’ as evidence that symmetry has been achieved, effectively dismissing larger concerns over the rights of those who remain marginalized and subjugated. Further, the inclusion of sexual minorities under the terms of individual rights is then used in propaganda by the state to demonstrate how civilized, modern, liberal, and democratic the West is, particularly in opposition to backward, pre-modern, and non-democratic states (such as in the Middle East) – a tactic rooted in Orientalism.

The equation is simple: Racist/Imperialist/Neoliberal State + homonational queers = Racist/Imperialist/Neoliberal State – responsibility for human rights violations. A few queers gain access to individual rights and acceptance under the state, and in exchange, the state is able to use these queers to conceal the state’s continued enactment of violence and violation of human rights.

 [Explanation from: http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/trending-homonationalism ]

(Source: pecunningham)