There Is No Such Thing As Bare Life (Contra Agamben)

I want to emphasize the ethical impulse that undergirds feminist politics of bringing to the public previously silenced voices, and how such an emphasis shows us the deep ethical structure of resistance in identity politics.

Put differently, getting away from an overly epistemic understanding of identity politics might let us see that there is always a relationship to alterity that can serve as the beginning of political resistance—the failure to create a community with a stable, coherent epistemic status is not a prerequisite for a struggle for justice; our starting point is ethical and not epistemological.  A solidarity which traverses the distinction between life and language that can foster a community of those who have nothing in common.  This notion is inspired by Alphonso Lingis’s notion of a “community of those who have nothing in common.”

We had an interesting discussion in my postcolonial theory class today, which neatly summed up and drew together the underlying concern of all of my classes for the past two years:  where does the Left go now?  It seems that all we’ve been doing (or at least those who had been part of the New Left and the new social movements of the last few decades of the last century and witnessed its breakup and the crisis of socialist/radical democratic politics which has led in Britain to the slow, agitated death of British Marxism and to dying spasms in the US in the form of a largely paralyzed feminist and racial politics, and finally in Europe with the dissolution of the new social movements which were largely initiated by the return of colonial intellectuals to the global metropoles…) is eulogizing the Left–or, at least, the Left as many of my professors knew it, and the Left of which my generation of theorists have inherited.  This isn’t to say that whatever we call “The Left” doesn’t still occasionally show its traces, but global, radical challenges to late capitalist social formations are becoming more difficult to articulate politically, analyses of ideology (in the Frankfurt school sense) and the decline of structuralism (and the double-decline of post-structuralism) are all leaving an enormous intellectual and political vacuum for those who are (I think hopelessly) trying to resuscitate whatever remained after the demise of the New Left in the 70s.

It’s only recently that I’ve realized how much my own theses have been a reflection of a frustration with trying to articulate a vision of a politics for what might come after “the Left” which simultaneously is attentive to the deep and rich history of its politics since the mid 19th century but is also willing to recognize that the Left as my teachers once knew it (and my classmates from Germany) is a project that we need to move past (again, both intellectually and politically).  I now wonder to what extent my turn to Levinas and third-world feminist politics is an attempt to recast the traditional emphasis on the Left on the Gramscian notion of “hegemony” and towards something like a global resistance movement rooted in an ethics of alterity.

At the least, I’m finally beginning to notice the little things that my professors at Chicago (and upon reflection, at Vanderbilt) are saying that betray a kind of exhaustion (or an internalized frustration) with where we are now.

I had a breakthrough for my thesis about an hour ago.  I have been on an intellectual high since then.  I’ve been writing my thoughts in small chunks for the past hour to try to capture in whatever fragmented way what it is that I want to say in the theory part of my thesis.

I’d like to post them as they are, as I’ve written them on post-it notes as small, short, theoretical vignettes.  Feel free to comment on them; they’re a great way for me to organize the small, multiple moving parts of my project and try to gleam the underlying narrative that I want to offer.  Pedagogically, I think this is an excellent way to work through the nuances of a large argument.  Expect lots of frequent and short posts on Elles Disent in the coming days as I work at building the argumentative narrative.

What is Ethics? Ethics is the diachronic and eschatological (perhaps, if we wanted to use the word, messianic) pressing of disorder on our epistemic rules and categories for Justice.  Its origin (or it’s incitement?) is the presence of another person—the Face of the Other.

Take two.

Ethical Metaphysics that Isn’t A Metaphysics: Instead of asserting the lack of foundations for feminist politics, reading Levinas into a feminist project reminds us how important it is that we enact the contingency of identity—that is, that a radically anti-essentialist politics both is in the name of difference and for the sake of difference, and that for this to have the kind of purchase we need in our relationships to others, we need to grasp the importance of contingency in that it always makes reference to the Face of the Other—the origin of the World.

Take Three.

Identity Before Identity Politics: Race and Sex Genealogy: I want to approach the problem of understanding justice from the entry point of contemporary identity politics and notions of democratic representation.  I will argue that the logic of identity that dominates identity politics now is a logic that determines “identity” as an epistemological formation (Ladelle McWhorter, Linda Nicholson, Anne Fausto-Sterling).  As a result, in identity politics, claims of justice in identity politics take on an epistemic quality whereby a claim of justice counts as a claim of justice depending on the epistemic stability of the identity (based on notions of commonality) which authorizes the claim.

Sorry for the delay on this.  I had some difficulty producing the proposal, and I’ve been spending the last week workshopping it.  I’ve now attached a link to my provisional draft of the MA thesis proposal.  You guys will see strong resonances between my BA thesis and this project, but in actuality it’s pretty different.  It starts from the same set of questions, though.

In short, it’s about the role of the moral skeptic in politics.  I’m arguing that the belief that the moral skeptic is a problem for politics (because we might be reduced to a severe relativism) is tied to an idea of politics that construes claims of justice as claims of knowledge.  (The political becomes the epistemological.)  So, I’ll begin with a brief history of the rise of the New Left (primarily through postcolonialism and British Cultural Studies), and then its consequent withering and its replacement with identity politics.  Then, I’ll show how this transition preserved a view of politics that is “scientific,” in the sense that politics becomes the realm of making claims and rational justifications (the rise of the “social sciences,” and the prominence of economic rationalism as the privileged model of the human sciences–i.e. Richard Posner and friends).  Then, I explain the way that feminist theory was produced in the midst of this view of politics, why it is problematic, and how Levinas offers us conceptual categories that lets us see what constitutes “the Political” as already embedded in an ethical register.

It’s ambitious, and there are going to be major difficulties since I have to translate the vocabulary of Levinas into a political theory idiom.  Still, this is something I’m deeply passionate about, so I think it’s worth the risk to take on this project.

Link here for proposal.

Also, For Your Enjoyment:  my current book list for the quarter:

• de Vitoria’s Lectures on De Indis
• Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws
• Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew
• Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
• Robert Gooding-Williams’s In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America
• Rousseau’s Confessions and Emile

Now that I know I am taking next year off, I can relax a bit on my thesis preparations; if I want, I can take the summer to finish it (which will delay graduation until August).  I’d still prefer to finish in June, but we’ll see.

I have finished an outline of my thesis proposal.  I am going to flesh it out into a paper tonight, in preparation for next week’s presentation to my advisor.  January is also the month where I will be “meeting and greeting” various faculty and “shop” for a supervisor, assuming that they agree to take me as a student as well.  Lots of big kid things to do in the coming weeks.

I will attach as a .pdf my thesis proposal (it might help you guys craft your own as well) when I finish tonight (hopefully).  I wanted to go ahead and post, though, since I’ve been MIA due to schoolwork and mono.

Also, a picture that seriously cracked me up for several minutes when I saw it.  I laughed out loud.

I will be taking a break from graduate studies next year, I think.

I’m kind of excited at the prospect of taking a breather.  I can finally pick up some useful language skills and get a serious publication out.

Just thought you guys might want to know.  (There is a slim possibility that I will return to Nashville to teach, if I can’t find a teaching job in Chicago.)

-kevin

The Midwest Political Science Association, the regional branch of the professional political scientist’s organization APSA, is having their annual conference in Chicago next spring.  I will be giving a talk titled “Impossible Justice: Levinasian Reflections on Identity, Narration, and Late Modern Identity Politics” in Section 33: Contemporary Political Theory.  The panel within which I am presenting is called “Heidegger, Levinas, and Environmentalism.”

I am excited. I didn’t expect my proposal to present a paper to actually be accepted.  This is a pretty major conference, and I get to (probably) screw up bigtime in front of all of the big kid political scientists.  Score.

Additionally, I’ve been offered to chair a panel at the conference “Butler and Ranciere.”  I’m not sure whether to accept the offer; while I certainly know their work very well, I don’t see why a first year grad student would chair a panel at a somewhat prestigious conference (or, at least, a big conference).  I have to decide by Wednesday whether to accept the offer to chair the panel.  Thoughts would be welcome.

Here is the overview for my talk from the program:

Title:Impossible Justice: Levinasian Reflections on Identity, Narration, and Late Modern Identity Politics
Overview: An attempt at tackling the pragmatics of contemporary identity politics, its attendant problems of essentialism, and its Liberal logic of identity by providing a politicized re-reading of Emmanuel Levinas and his phenomenological account of ethics.
Authors:
Duong, Kevin [University of Chicago]
Discussant:Harold, Philip [Robert Morris University]

I encourage everyone to attend… except registration for non-APSA members is 100 dollars.  So don’t.

and talk about Rawls, Levinas, Habermas, the difference between first and third year grad students, and the unique way in which they’ve internalized their own academic inadequacies and displaced them onto awful drinking habits.

So yes, a group of us (who style ourselves as literary critics, philosophers, political theorists, and a financial analyst trained as a Schmittian-Nietzschean theorist) go to a bar… to talk about theory.  This is, apparently, the life of grad students, of which I find wonderful.

I apologize for not making a post recently.  I will make one at the end of next week, since in these next few days, I have three major papers/presentations to organize for my classes, in addition to reading a few books.

So, I’ll leave a quote for now:

On the one hand, then, it is the ethical exigency alone that founds the assembling of being, its truth in a totality and in representation; reason and truth are the outcome of, and the proper work of, justice. But, on the other hand, if there is not a truth which Being itself pursues, if signification and truth come from beyond being, if there is not an ontological truth independent of and rivalling the ethical truth, the truth that is founded by the ethical exigency ipso facto dissimulates that exigency. The said is a fixing and a silence of the saying that makes it significant. The ethical structure is completely covered over by the exhibition of the world.

- Alphonso Lingis, in his Translator’s Introduction to Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being.

 

I am procrastinating my readings (only momentarily, since I have a lot) for one of my really cool classes in the School of Social Work Administration.  The class is SSA 61900: Place, Poverty, and Social Policy.  It’s a really cool urban policy/geography/public policy course that focuses heavily on the development of Chicago itself in the last few decades.  (Exciting, also, that I am the token theorist in the class, I think.  The professor was delighted to have a philosophy/literature student though, since he has had them before apparently.)  Already learning a lot.

The title quote is from the essay “An Aesthetic of Blackness” by hooks 1990, 103. It is one of the primary essays I am using for my work on dwelling and hospitality and how they come to shape the politics of identity.  It, incidentally, is becoming my primary project for the social work class above.  So, since I do not have much time, I want to just offer quick updates on my projects.

Revolutionary Spectres: Democratic-Socialist Strategy and the Ethical Trace (provisionally titled):

This project is a close, exegetical work on conceptions of revolution by Hannah Arendt as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; the former reflects mostly on the American and French revolution and the complex paradoxes and difficulties in the notion of “founding” or giving birth to something new (like a new nation), while the latter two write regarding the socialist and worker’s revolutions in the twentieth century, largely in Eastern Europe and South America.  The project unfolds by way of interrogating the dynamics of revolution, and segways into a discussion of how the practice of revolution is a result of the phenomenological experience of the Other(s) as ethical trauma which archives in any revolutionary practice a “trace” that testifies always to our being-in-society with others who make revolutionary fights meaningful. The point is to add depth and layers to what is conventionally understood as “revolution” so that contemporary struggles for justice don’t accidentally reproduce the structures of inequality which sparked the revolutionary spirit in the first place.

We Know Not Who We Are: Reflections on Hospitality and Dwelling on the South Side of Chicago

This is my attempt at merging much of the theoretical work in my thesis to ethnographic research and studies in urban geography to really flesh out the complex interplay of storytelling, dwelling and identity, and the material organization of our homes and spaces of intimacy.  I already gave a run-down of its theoretical terrain in my last post, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Book Review:  Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, by Richard Rorty

I am doing a book review, on behalf of the Chicago Political Theory Workshop, of this collection of interviews with the philosopher Richard Rorty for the Political Theory Foundation (a subsection of the American Political Science Association).  The Chicago PT Workshop gets free copies of new academic books in political theory and distributes it to members (also for free) to people willing to write a professional review to publish for the Political Theory Foundation.  Not much to say about that, except I’m going to read it… and review it.

Book Review: Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique, by Lisa Schwartzman

Same thing as above, although not as pressing.

Since I won’t be able to make a substantive post until this weekend, a quick update with recommended books and currently-reading books as well as a quotation for “food for thought.”

New Books Recommended by Kevin!  (and an older book I’m currently reading):

• Ladelle McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy
• Judith Butler’s new book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
• (reading) Ernesto Laclau’s New Reflections On the Revolution of Our Time

Food for thought quotation:

If we do not preserve this inhuman region where we can encounter this or that something, that which completely escapes the exercise of rights, we do not deserve the rights granted to us.  What use is the right to freedom of expression if we have nothing to say but what has already been said?  And how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don’t know how to say if we don’t pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?  This silence stands as an exception to the reciprocity that characterizes rights, but it is its legitimation.  We should indeed accord an absolute right to this “second existence,” because it is what provides the right to have rights.  Yet since it has nothing to do with rights, it will always have to make do with an amnesty.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, quoted from the end of Thomas Keenan’s excellent Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics

“Discourse is not life.  Its time is not yours.” – Michel Foucault, cited from the translator’s introduction to Cavarero 2000.

A quick status update of something I am working on for an article regarding Adriana Cavarero’s landmark Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and Gaston Bachelard’s work on spaces of dwelling from The Poetics of Space.  (There is, of course, Levinas, Derrida, and much of bell hooks in this new article, too.)  The article’s main thematic exegesis is about what it means to engage in the politics of resistance by trying to occupy a space that bell hooks calls “critical marginality.”  I do this by formulating an account of our identities as metaphoric dwellings.  The concept of Dwelling is elaborated by a number of different theorists as places of withdrawal that open up the possibility of hospitality to the Other who is an absolute stranger.  I think there is a relationship between bell hooks’s “critical marginality” and dwelling/hospitality that can be fleshed out which might help us understand more acutely why, contemporarily, many people’s immediate reflex regarding hospitality is a conditional one.  That is, any demand that a stranger might make upon me is immediately greeted with the knee-jerk reflex “why should I?”  This is obviously not a universalizable response, so using the conceptual tools of critical theory (always historicize! *wags finger in the air*) can be productive here, as well as Ernesto Laclau’s recent work on populism.

So, let’s think of this post, and my next several, as an extended thinking exercise that might map out the terrain of how this kind of an inquiry might unfold.  For this entry, I’ll start with how I came across this puzzle, and the next several will probably be entries regarding research methodology.  We’ll see how it goes, though.

First, to begin with our fairly famous-yet-totally-disregarded-for-some-reason statement by Foucault.  One could read this sentence to be a sweeping condemnation of that theoretical tendency for which many seem so keen on attributing to Foucault: of reducing everything to “discourse” and “language.”  That is, it’s a fairly straightforward sentence that his critics seem to be purposely ignoring so that they can publish useless papers and beef up their “anti-postmodern” creds to get promoted in their departments and join the inane bandwagon of condemning English and Political Theory departments to chilly academic gulags.  And no, I’m not bitter or jaded.  Duh.

Now, I’m not totally suggesting that his critics that espouse this particular complaint are purposely misreading him.  One reason that they might be “misreading” him in this particularly en vogue way is because the gravity of this statement is often undetected.  The ease of the statement “discourse is not life,” should make it clear, though, that discourse is not life.  That is, there is a disjunction issued between language and living (by whom or what is a question of interest here), and that mediation between these two is a) obviously not a given and b) not at all adequately theorized and so c) giving Michel Foucault and us a beefy project to work on.  So, in four words, Michel Foucault made it clear that those who critiqued him for reducing everything to discourse did everything in their power not to read him.  Super.

Now, its this disjunction between life and language that I am interested in, mainly because I have a hunch it is the gap that is mediated by a very specific desire: that is, for a narratable identity.  Building off of my undergraduate thesis though, I am using:

1. the gap between life and language as a place where one desires an identity
2. the necessary relationship between having an identity and narrating it to others, so that I might come to know (reflexively) who I am

to build the case that there is a complex relationship between articulating who I am and living who I am.  Cue analysis of “dwelling” as the political practice that bridges these two separate yet related themes.  Put differently, the gap between life and language, between what you are and articulating who you are which induces a desire for identity is stitched together in the (not inevitable or universal) tendency to conceptualize identity as a dwelling as exactly that place that indemnifies me from hospitality.

This is the opposite (and thus reversible via deconstruction) of what Levinas theorized, and exactly what William Connolly and Wendy Brown suggested would happen in identity politics over a decade ago.

I realize this is a fairly complex puzzle I am setting up, so to try to distill it into bullet points:

• The fact that what and who we are not necessarily the same thing (discourse is not life) gives to us a desire for something loosely called an “identity” which purports to be a stable monolithic concept, but in reality is tenuously stitched together by paving over internal antagonisms with hegemonic storytelling (see my thesis, I guess, for this point).
• The desire for identity opens the question of dwelling and hospitality, since identity always introduces the question of difference, and thus, the stranger.
• Why is it, then, that if the dwelling is the example par excellence of our chance for hospitality and justice, that it also has become the method par excellence of  refusing our responsibilities towards strangers?

Although my thesis tried to use the concept of singularity to break through the undemocratic reflexes of shutting the door on the stranger, after reading bell hooks’s essay “Postmodern Blackness” from her book Yearning: Gender, Race, and Cultural Politics, I think her call to invite us to enter the space of marginality is a good way to understand anew what hospitality can, and should, mean.

Kevin, over and out.  (Edit:  next entry by me will be returning to freedom again, as an extremely indirect response to both Sarah and Jake)

“…does not the presence of the Other put in question the naïve legitimacy of freedom?  Does not freedom appear to itself as a shame for itself? … Freedom is not justified by freedom…but rather [by encountering] the Other without allergy, that is, in justice” (Levinas 1969, 303).

I have begun the first entry of this project, which will probably have as one of its thematic undercurrents an analysis of freedom, with a quote from Levinas that is meant to put into question the value of freedom as freedom.  That is to say, I have begun our loosely constructed website narrative by questioning whether freedom, both as a theoretical and empirical category of analysis, actually needs to have an account of itself offered.  I can, with a certain amount of confidence, say that Sarah, Jake, and I all are invested in talking about freedom, about promoting it, and sustaining its political progeny: justice.  Of course, the three of us also have extremely different perspectives on freedom as a thematic element and a political concept, and what constitutes “justice.”  So, in light of this, I think it is imperative that I begin, at least, with first asking why begin the first website entry with a (seemingly) skeptical quote by Levinas on the value of freedom.

Before I pursue that line of thought more closely, since I am writing the inaugural post for this blog, and in doing so establishing an informal precedent for its overall trajectory, I should begin by saying that this website has been established with a number of aims in mind:

1. That its contributors have a place to write and think in chunks, and so digest where we currently are in our own respective intellectual projects
2. That we have a way of tracing the trajectory of our thoughts, so that we might see what themes surface as important ones, and what details or questions fall away as unimportant
3. That the process of thinking is itself democratized, with democratized here being understood as a restructuring of the research/writing process as horizontally organized, and not vertically.  Put differently, that it not be “goal” oriented towards pursuing one question, but to be presented as a series of loosely connected vignettes that are all in dialogue with one another (and each of us).

Of course, outlining the aims and writing methodology of this website already betrays my own normative commitments as to what constitutes good writing and thinking: that it should be democratic, that it should be free to be fractured and discontinuous, and that, in the end, its question is a political one always.  These commitments which inaugurate this website are also why I wanted to begin with a quote by Levinas regarding freedom.  It both foregrounds one of the themes of the website as well as explicitly exposes my own intellectual position regarding the matter.

To elaborate, Levinas’s point here is that freedom is not, by itself, justified.  Freedom is arbitrary when it is understood as an abstract concept disincarnated from the most important thing in the world:  other people.  In turn, this also both logically and ethically signals to us that there is no such thing as freedom except for its negation.  As a concept, it exists only through its incompletion and impossibility.

In short, Levinas’s point is that freedom only matters, has any orientation, and thus something that can have meaning (I mean “meaning” here in the strongest epistemological sense), when it is already curtailed and invested as responsibility for other people.  To encounter others “without allergy” means to invest freedom as responsibility for anyone and everyone, where that practice of freedom cannot be reduced to political axioms, rules, norms, etc.  There is no excuse (no allergic reaction) that can indemnify us from our responsibilities.  And so freedom only becomes freedom in the paradoxical moment that it ceases to be itself by becoming responsibility for others.  For me, justice names that paradox.

I suppose I should finally begin this fun little project of ours with a quick genealogy of my own intellectual training and epistemological formation by way of describing my current research project.  Full disclosure, so to speak.

Currently, I am working on two different projects.  The more mature one recently culminated in a journal article that is under review at Philosophy & Social Criticism.  Its abstract is as follows:

Much of the debate over identity politics takes as its point of departure a critique of essentialism, particularly from the Left.  In this article, I argue that these critiques of essentialism are quick to encounter an ethical conundrum—the inevitable violence of applying ethical categories—which is a result of leaving intact the fundamental logic of identity—that identity is, at its core, an epistemological construct.  By working through the mutual inflections of a number of theoretical genealogies that undergird today’s identity politics, I reveal the protocols of this political paradigm while seeking to resituate critiques of essentialism by recoding identity as an ethical construct.  I do this by following and critiquing Emmanuel Levinas and politicizing his scene of address, in the end arriving at an understanding of community and singularity that permits identity’s articulation to be an affirmation of alterity and responsibility through difference.

My second project deals with the recent work of socialist theoreticians and radical democratic theory, primarily in the works of towering figures like Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and some Gayatri Spivak (who doesn’t know how to order a combo at Wendy’s, for the record and from personal experience).  Although the empirical questions regard the possibility of human rights qua institutions, the theoretical concern is whether the conceptual category of “human rights” can actually bring about radical democracy; for example, Laclau’s New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time and, in a different vein, Thomas Keenan’s Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics.

I think that should just about sum it up.  I’ve written enough, so I’ll let Sarah and Jake give it a go.

Linkages:

Professor Gerald Figal’s good cultural theory stuff on his blog and involving his new book on Okinawa tourism.

Interesting article from The Guardian regarding new Iraqi violence against LGBT communities.

Arat, Yeşim. “Contestation and Collaboration: Women’s Struggles for

Empowerment in Turkey.” In The Cambridge History of Turkey Volume 4: Turkey in the Modern World. Edited by Reşat Kasaba. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 388-418.

—————. “Feminist Insitutions and Democratic Aspirations: The Case of the

Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation.” In Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman.” Edited by Zehra F. Arat. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, 295-309.

—————. “Feminists, Islamists, and Political Change in Turkey,” Political

Psychology 19(1) (March 1998): 117-131.

Gündüz, Zuhal Yeşilyurt. “The Women’s Movement in Turkey: From Tanzimat

      towards European Union Membership,” Perceptions 9 (Autumn 2004): 115-134.

Ecevit, Yildiz.  (2007).  “Women’s Rights, Women’s Organizations, and the State”. 

Human Rights in Turkey. 187-201. Ed. Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat.  University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

Levin, Yasemin Celik.  (2007).  “The Effect of CEDAW on Women’s Rights”.    Human

      Rights in Turkey. 202-213. Ed. Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat.  University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

NGO WEBSITES:

Women for Women’s Human Rights (NGO) useful information

http://www.wwhr.org/national_advocacy.php

KA-DER (NGO) – useful information

http://www.womenlobby.org/site/1Template1.asp?

DocID=520&v1ID=&RevID=&namePage=&pageParent=&DocID_sousmenu=

Input Paper #3 for Turkey

By Kevin Duong 

The Gender/Sexuality Narrative in Turkey

In my previous input paper, I had attempted to map out the terrain with which an analysis of cultural narratives and the way that the politics of writing and rewriting narratives sustained and precluded the Kurdish population in Turkey in asserting stories about their lives.  In trying to describe how the possibility of full membership to the EU has affected Turkish cultural and national narratives, I want to use the Kurdish question as one case study of how Turkey’s politics have re-oriented themselves since EU membership became an objective on the nation’s political agenda. 

In this input paper, I want to focus on another dimension of Turkish politics that has been dramatically transformed by the Turkey-EU relationship—that of sexuality, and the way that Turkey’s transforming national politics have also attempted to re-write and displace the voices of Turkey’s queer communities in the name of national “progress.”  I think these two dimensions, while related and connected through issues of gender, class, and national identity, have distinct histories that are rapidly changing direction in order to meet the EU’s criteria for admission.

The EU has held influence over Turkey’s politics, by dangling the reward of full EU membership, for several decades now.  Following World War II, Turkey joined a number of European organizations, such as the OEEC, Council of Europe, and NATO in 1948, 1949, and 1952 respectively.[1]  Turkey’s admission to these organizations built up momentum and expectation for eventual EU membership, eventually culminating with the adoption of the Ankara Treaty in 1963.  The Ankara Treaty officiated Turkey as an associate member of the EU, and included language making explicit that Turkey desired full membership in due time.  In order to facilitate the ascension process, several agencies were created in order to monitor the progress.  One of these agencies, the Turkish-EC Association Council, plays a significant role in the monitoring of Turkey’s comportment to EU admission standards.[2]  Through this new monitoring relationship between the EU and Turkey, the EU has offered scathing critiques of Turkey’s history of human rights violations.  Recently, these critiques have more emphatically addressed the issue of LGBT rights in the country.

In 2002-2004, active LGBT and women’s rights organizations in Turkey lobbied hard for major reforms in the Turkish Penal Code to transform the language from treating the law “as the protector of nation’s morality” to “the law as the protector people’s sexual and bodily integrity.”[3]  In 2005, following these successes, the Justice Commission of Turkey’s Parliament “voted to include new language in the provision barring discrimination in a wide range of areas of public life…” where sexual orientation was included as a protected status in the new Criminal Code.[4]  Supported by the same LGBT activist groups from the previous few years, including a group called Lambda Istanbul, local organizations worked to include this language in the new law.  However, this specific language was eventually diluted to a general discrimination policy, and with the failure to include explicit language on sexual orientation, LGBT human rights suffered a great setback.  These setbacks culminated in a court order demanding that Lambda Istanbul disband in early June 2008, one month after the publication of the Human Rights Watch report on Gender and Sexuality in Turkey.[5]

The progress of LGBT rights in Turkey is complex and scattered.  The various LGBT movements are gaining ground at the same time that they are losing legal battles.  I want to argue that this inconsistent progress for LGBT communities in Turkey is tied to the Kurdish question in Turkish politics because they are both being mediated through a politics of narrative writing.  Although Turkey presents itself as a secularist nation, the conflation of religion and nationalism in Turkey problematizes this appearance.  The conflation of Muslim sensibilities with a Turkish national narrative allows for the secularization of religion sentiments through a discursive trick.  By allowing religious beliefs to be integrated into a sense of Turkish nationalism, fundamental Muslim beliefs are disguised as beliefs serving the national interest, which are secular in language and appearance but religious in origin.  The ambiguous language of Turkish laws protecting “morality” or “decency” and promoting “public morals” allows discrimination and violence against LGBT citizens under the discursive disguise of a public morality narrative offered by a “secular” nationalist discourse.[6]  Abuses against subaltern sexualities in Turkey are endemic and common.  Citizens highlight the difference in the LGBT narrative, and thus their social treatment, before and after the modernization of Turkey:

Under Ottoman Islam, homosexual behavior was a sickness—bottoms were sick, they had to be taken care of.  But you did not beat or abuse them.  Gay-bashing, the hatred of a thing called ‘gayness,’ is imported from the West.[7]

This resident feels the LGBT narratives of Turkish people have transformed violently because of increased “Westernization” arising from increased influence of the EU in Turkish social norms and politics. 

As a result of this subjugation of LGBT concerns in Turkey from a national discourses that is, in reality, rife with religious underpinnings, their narratives are fragmented and constructed across international spaces and avenues.  This globalization of the LGBT narratives in Turkey is not unknown by the local communities.  A transgender woman says, “First we have to take back the categories…to own them, and then we can start redefining them.  And then find the ones we can live in.”[8]  She is acutely aware that the writing of her own narrative has been taken out of her hands, and displaced into spaces beyond her influence.  She echoes Desai’s argument that international spaces are now the privileged spaces of activism.  The simple reality that much of the research on the status of LGBT communities in Turkey largely comes from organizations outside of Turkey’s boundaries (although this is slowly shifting), only emphasizes how globalized the incredibly local narrative of LGBT experiences in Turkey has become.  The major agents of writing the Turkish LGBT narrative is the state of Turkey itself, predominantly opposed to sexual rights, and this writing happens in international spaces such as the Turkey-EU Association and their negotiations.

What we see when we scrutinize the LGBT movement in Turkey is the increasing role of international NGO’s and other agencies in revealing the subjugated narratives of LGBT citizens from international spaces.  These organizations attempt to contest Turkey’s narrative of nationalism, secularism, and EU candidacy, from non-state spaces. In contrast, organizations within the country itself, like Lambda Istanbul and KAOS-GL are crumbling under legal battles from the government, who invokes the same narrative NGO’s and international bodies are trying to contest.  At the center of this enormous machinery of narrative writing is the LGBT community in Turkey itself, unable to assert itself politically or socially.  They have lost authorship of their own political stories, much like the Kurdish population, and this is necessary—in the Turkish administrations’ eyes—for the sake of appearing “modern” enough for the EU.  Only now are they beginning to realize that their human rights shortcomings are making them unlikely candidates for full membership.[9]

Input Paper #2: Turkey

By Kevin Duong

In the past few decades after the ratification of Turkey’s new constitution in 1982, their project of nation building has re-oriented itself due to external circumstances.  Primarily, the possibility of Turkey’s EU ascension has shifted the terms of political transformation in Turkey’s domestic politics.  There are several elements of nation building that are transforming, and in this particular input paper, I want to focus on the shifting politics of “framing” involving the Kurdish population in Turkey.

            Ever since the clashes between the Kurdistan’s Worker’s Party and the domestic conflicts in Turkey in the late 1980’s and the early 1990s, the status of the Kurdish population in Turkey has been exceptionally volatile.  The end of the 20^th century saw the Kurdistan’s Worker’s Party calling for an independent Kurdish state.  However, their demands how now shifted focus onto cultural rights.  Although the Kurdish culture is also diverse, pluralistic, and contains its own inner tensions, the way that the dominant Turkish administration treats the Kurds is often aggressively monolithic, with the government vacillating between labeling the Kurds a terrorist group to a minority group claiming cultural rights.  This vacillation manifests in several ways, including media control and the establishment national languages.  In 2006, the Turkish government passed legislation allowing for one hour of television and radio broadcasting to be in the Kurdish language, recognizing and legitimizing a cultural claim.  This new legislation has not been without resistance.  In addition, there have been discussions about whether the Kurdish language should be added as an official national language.  The politics behind the inclusion of Kurdish as a national language cannot escape the spectre of an independent Kurdish state, which the Turkish government fears.

Because the Kurds are not confined to just Turkey, but rather the surrounding nations of Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the Kurds are a discursively volatile group; they are at the boundary of Turkish society in that they are sometimes discussed as Turkish citizens (although still marginalized) at the same time that they are discussed as a foreign and invasive culture penetrating into Turkey’s borders and threatening their secularist policies.  Because the Kurds live in multiple countries and cross boundaries, the government is able to discuss them simultaneously as citizens as well as foreigners, depending on the political question at hand.

Because Kurds are not strictly, or at least hegemonically considered part of the dominant (and exclusive) Turkish society, they are a type of cultural refugee.  As Chen-Tiberghien suggests, their marginalization from Turkish political society also marginalizes the extent to which human rights, and especially women’s rights, can be enforced.  This kind of marginalization is exacerbated due to the privileging of international forums and conventions as the sites of activism, where the major players are delegates from nation-states.  Since Kurds are not politically powerful in Turkey, they are not given strong representation at international forums and conventions on human rights; rather, their Turkish counterparts are the agents of their representation.  Where the UN and INGO’s are the privileged spaces of activism, Kurds lose many of their voices by being culturally marginalized in Turkey.  Third-party organizations who have passed resolutions concerning the Kurdish question in Turkey have suggested that they “[regret] that Kurds are seen as a third party that is not consulted in EU-Turkey deliberations on Kurdish issues.”

            Thus, because they are politically excluded in these international forums, people who are not Kurds get to frame their political existence.  Although many of our readings focus on how certain established groups frame issues in their favor, and how framing is one of the most significant strategies for getting concrete gains in terms of policy, the strategy of framing also discursively constitutes and organizes populations that are culturally excluded—like the Kurds.  Turkey’s process of nation-building at the international level requires framing the issue of the Kurds in a manner that helps their EU Candidacy status, and the shifting framework in which the Kurds are discussed and negotiated by the Turkish administration in international discourses is one of the important political strategies that affects whether the Kurds are considered “terrorists” or simply a cultural minority.  That is, the Kurdish narrative is one that is subjected to the calculated and dominating Turkish framing strategies in the context of their imminent EU status.

            What is at stake in this process of nation-building is not simply whose narrative – the Kurds or the Turkish—gets to inform domestic and foreign policy, although that is a large part.  What Turkey’s nation building politics now reveals is how one cultural narrative gets to write another, and that the process of re-writing less predominant cultural narratives is an exercise of power that occurs in avenues like the U.N. and conventions.  This process does not simply involve subjugating one narrative in favor of another.  Rather, the grander narrative of EU ascension that Turkey has ascribed to, and which unfolds in international forums, involves the process of writing the Kurdish narrative and constituting them in whatever manner necessary to gain EU membership. 

Bibliography:

Narayan, Uma.  1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge.

McClintock, Anne.  1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest.  New York: Routledge.

Desai, Manisha. 2005. Transnationalism: the face of feminist politics post-Beijing. 

Resolution on the rights of the Kurdish population in Turkey. <http://www.eldr.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=646>

Müftüler-Baç, Meltem.  The Impact of the European Union on Turkish Politics.  East European Quarterly  34:159  Summer 2000.

Lennon, David.  Turkey’s Drive for EU Membership.  Europe  No.420:18-21  October 2002.


Human Rights Watch World Report 2007. 425-429

I just finished Desai, and I was really impressed with her article.  Something I thought of while reading her:

She writes about the rise of the human rights framework as something that feminists around the world, and especially during the Vienna convention, could rally around.  They could create a “solidarity of difference” rather than one based on contention, and this was facilitated by the mantra that “women’s rights are human rights.”  She then goes on, however, to describe how the “principles and language” of human rights has been co-opted by militarism, rising fundamentalism, and the perpetuation of neo-liberal economic discourses.  This has led to the erosion of the efficacy of human rights because it has, at least on her account, not offered a rigorous enough critique of the logic of statehood and national sovereignty.  I think this is really something to think about, and a problem that exemplifies its complexity is the problem of Guantanamo Bay, and its detainees who will (hopefully) soon return to the States to re-enter the court system.  

Desai writes that human rights discourses have often argued that “the State is the protector, promoter, and enforcer of these rights even as non-state actors are held accountable for some women’s rights violations.”  

Although I think this is good, that human rights agencies and courts are trying to hold accountable non-state agents, what about refugees who are not claimed by any country?  Refugees are supposed to be people who are not claimed by any state, that they are nationless because no one wants to accept them.  Even many detainees from GITMO cannot return to their original nations because they will not accept them.  Without a state to enforce human rights, how do you have human rights? 

Desai argues (and I agree) that the UN and NGO’s are the privileged sites of transnational social activism, including activities like framing issues.  I think Joachim’s article makes this really clear-much of framing happens at international conventions and agencies.  So who gets to frame issues for refugees? For GITMO detainees?  They don’t have a nation, they have no state to enforce and defend their human rights.  International agencies may try to defend them on their behalf, but isn’t that a kind of co-opting too?

My question, then, is that this problem seems to indicate that we might need to talk about a right to have rights.  I think Desai makes it clear that with the ridiculously complex terrain of human rights, we have to make sure that the language and principles of human rights is available to those who are being violated, and that human rights are not contingent on citizenship to a state who will enforce those rights for you.

I know I may sound like I am disparaging the human rights discourse – I’m not.  I’m rather fond of it, actually.  But I think Desai is pointing us towards those vacuums where transnational activism and human rights haven’t been able to permeate, and one of those vacuums has been GITMO.  This is something that we have to think through very soon, since GITMO’s days are now numbered.

Input Paper – Turkey

By Kevin Duong

I think that I would like to focus on the relationship between Turkey’s EU accession candidacy, which broadly falls under the category of nation building, and the changing orientation of Turkey’s nation building as the macro-discourse that provides the context for a changing discourse on human security and peace within the country.  Specifically, my tentative theory is that as Turkey’s engagement with “nation building” as an on-going project has shifted from a country constantly re-writing their Constitution and rising out of the ashes of military coups, to a country that seeks to ascend to EU membership.  This changing telos of their nation building process has caused the way that the discuss peace and security to dramatically shift.  Emphasis on negative peace has given way to a robust discussion on Turkey’s adherence to principles of positive peace, including discussions on rural infrastructure and accessible education.  Security, too, has shifted.  The discussion has changed (broadly) from national security and stabilizing the country militaristically to the security of individual ethnic groups and religious groups, among others.

There are a few sites of interest that I might want to focus on (at least, thus far that I can tell).  One is going to be the transformation of the Turkish constitution over time.  New legislation like the reform of the civil code in 2001, grants extra defense for women involved in domestic violence.  New human rights improvements that have been recorded by the Human Rights Watch, as well as their areas of improvement, can be investigated pretty carefully.  For example, according to the Human Rights Watch, the military in Turkey is resistant to allowing the laws of EDHR to gain wide-use application by incorporating these laws into military norms.  This has led to rogue security forces conducting human rights violations with little consequence. 

Another area of interest is the restriction to university education if women decide to veil.  There is considerably international pressure, through apparatuses like the European Court of Human Rights, which is exerting influence over Turkey’s position on women’s access to education and the veiling issue.  Here, we can see the international pressures from the EU for changes in Turkish domestic policy intersect with women’s positive peace and security, as well as the conflicts between Turkey’s history of trying to balance secular and religious dimensions of their society.  I’m going to have to research other apparatuses which are being used by/for/and against Turkey that are attempting to shape its internal dialogue about peace and security from the outside.  According to the CIA Factbook, Turkey has not accepted compulsory International Court of Justice jurisdiction.  Since Turkey has somewhat limited participation in many of the major international legal apparatuses, it might be more production for me to look at its economic ties.  For example, Turkey’s strong relationship with Israel, as well as its increasing interdependency on its surrounding countries, might be shaping the way that they promulgate their concepts of human peace and security.  These discussions might be transformation in order to appeal to EU accession.

Issues like internal displacement and village infrastructure are also places I could research.  Because much of the internal displacement resulted from the civil war between the Kurdish and the Turks in the 1990s, we can also see here the intersection of cultural tensions within Turkey and their adherence to positive peace and security by rebuilding basic infrastructure like schools, telephone lines.  Turkey has received increasing scrutiny from external organizations about their inattention to these rural infrastructure projects that resulted from ethnic war.  Thus, Turkey has had to re-cast their image on a democracy dedicated to human security as including rural and kurdish cultural security.

1. If reproductive rights include the right not to reproduce, then doesn’t this include all forms of non-procreative sex, and why then should any one form have the status of normativity or moral virtue? That is, if we refuse the principle that only procreative sex is “good,” or that it has a higher place than any other form, are we willing to take up Gayle Rubin’s long-ago challenge and to reject all sexual hierarchies?

Petchesky seems to be asking us to rethink the separation of “sexual” and “reproductive” rights, and understand the two to be intimately bound up in the same kind of exclusive and overly dichotomous politics which generally governs discussions of sexuality.  She then drops this bombshell of a question, asking in sort:  how do we discuss reproductive rights with subaltern sexual identities, and what does it mean to include sexual “deviants” in the penumbra of reproductive rights?  She already goes ahead and dismisses the current political tendency to simply tack on extra letters to LGBT (think of the new Vanderbilt LGBTQI house) as a disingenuous kind of inclusion.  

Instead, she seems to take a page from Butler and suggest the fostering of a multiplicity of sites of erotic pleasure.  Shifting the emphasis from “procreative” reproduction to the proliferation of bodily erotic pleasure, she asks that we include sexualities and reproduction all under an analysis of bodily sexual experience (whether its procreative or not).  I find this suggestion incredibly compelling, but difficult to concretize. Because psychosexual development largely unfolds along a few dominant large-scale ideological axis, it would require immense collective action in order to accomplish what Petchesky wants.  In addition, as she mentioned, any subversion of the norms of reproductive politics and sexual politics includes both resistance and accommodation, so we cannot expect to completely avoid reinscribing our own understandings of sexual and reproductive norms, either, when we try to change the language of “sexual and reproductive rights.”  Again, we can see this in the new Vandy LGBTQI house.

It seems, then, that we might actually not be able to accomplish Ruben’s goal of abolishing sexual hierarchies.  Because these politics of sexuality and reproduction are rooted in history, we can’t totally avoid history reimposing itself on the present in the form of deep social convictions.  What can we do, then?  If not abolish sexual hierarchies overall, what can we expect from our strategies for resistance and transformation?