Gender-and-Poverty-Booklet

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Gender, Poverty
and Social
Inclusion
GLOBAL SCHOLARS ACADEMY | BUDAPEST, HUNGARY | JULY 18 - 22, 2022
OVERVIEW
Gender, Poverty and Social Inclusion
Faculty
•
•
Ratna Kapur (United Kingdom) Queen Mary University of London
Lynette Chua (Singapore) National University of Singapore
Description
In this stream we explore the concepts of gender, poverty, and social inclusion through a conversation on
the liberal individual subject, which rests at the core of the international human rights discourse. We discuss
how the subject is produced through prevailing assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, class and culture
that operate along an axis of inclusion and exclusion. The analysis is illustrated through case studies on
anti-trafficking tourism as humanitarianism, as well as feminist and LGBTQ advocacy struggles and state
repression in relation to the family.
STREAM READING | OVERVIEW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Gender, Poverty and Social Inclusion
Source
Pages
Part One: Overview
UN Secretary-General, Integrating the Gender Perspective into the Work of United Nations Human
Rights Treaty Bodies: Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc HRI/MC/1998/6 (3 September 1998)
1
Article 7.3 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998
1
Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of Subjection- Terror, Slavery, and Self-Marking in 19th Century America.
Excerpts from pp. 96-98
1-3
Brooks, G. The Lovers of the Poor, Selected Poems. Available at poetryfoundation.org/poems/43317/
the-lovers-of-the-poor
4-6
Marks, S. (2009) “Human Rights and the Bottom Billion” 1 European Human Rights Law Review 37-49.
Excerpts from pp. 37-45
7-9
Bhambra, G.K. ( 2021) “Narrating Inequality, Eliding Empire” 72 British Journal of Sociology 69-78.
Excerpts from pp. 69-72
10-12
Part Two: Close Reading Classical / Contemporary Texts
- Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Excerpts from pp. 163, 172185
13-14
Spivak, G. (1998). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, C. Nelson
and L. Grossberg, eds. Excerpts from pp. Excerpts pp. 66, 75-83, 102.
15-17
Jackson, Z. (2020) Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World. Excerpts from pp. 7-9
18-19
Fineman M.A. (2008) “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition” 20(1) Yale
Journal of Law & Feminism 1. Excerpts from pp. 8-12.
20-22
Part Three: Contemporary Case Studies
A. Anti-Trafficking Tourism as Humanitarianism
Bernstein, E. (2018) Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom. Excerpts from pp.
107-119
23-26
Chuang, J. (2010) “Rescuing Trafficking from Ideological Capture: Prostitution Reform and Antitrafficking Law and Policy” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 158, pp. 1655-1728. Excerpts from
1657, 1701-1703
UNODC. (25 Nov. 2009). Human Trafficking Fuels Violence Against Women. Available at: https://www.
unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2009/November/human-trafficking-fuels-violence-against-women.
html
B. Feminist/LGBT Advocacy and State Repression
-Wang, D. 2020. “Jia, as in Guojia: building the Chinese Family into a Filial Nationalist Project” 5 (1) China
Law & Society Review 1-32. Excerpts from pp. 2, 17- 20
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27-28
29
30-32
___________________________________________________________________________
UN Secretary-General, Integrating the Gender Perspective into the Work of United Nations
Human Rights Treaty Bodies: Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc HRI/MC/1998/6 (3
September 1998)
___________________________________________________________________________
The term ‘gender’ refers to the socially constructed roles of women and men that are ascribed
to them on the basis of their sex, in public and in private life. The term ‘sex’ refers to the
biological and physical characteristics of women and men. Gender roles are contingent on a
particular socio-economic, political and cultural context and are affected by other factors,
including age, race, class and ethnicity. Gender roles are learned and vary widely within and
between cultures. As social constructs, they can change. Gender roles shape women's access to
rights, resources and opportunities.
___________________________________________________________________________
Article 7.3 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998
_________________________________________________________________________
In international treaty law the only binding definition of gender is under Article 7.3 of the Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998 which states as follows:
“For the purposes of this Statute, it is understood that the term ‘gender’ refers to the
two sexes, male and female, within the context of society. The term ‘gender’ does not
indicate any meaning different from the above” (w.e.f. 2000)
___________________________________________________________________________
Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of Subjection- Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19th Century
America. Excerpts from pp. 96-98
___________________________________________________________________________
*96 Cobb, concerned with the neglect of sexual injury and the failure to protect slave
women from rape in slave law, slated that “although worthy of consideration by legislators,” it
need not cause undue concern because “the occurrence of such an offense is almost unheard
of; and the known lasciviousness of the negro, renders the possibility of its occurrence very
remote.”62 As the black male’s nature made “rape too often an occurrence,” the black female’s
imputed lasciviousness removed it entirely from consideration. It is not simply fortuitous that
gender emerges in relation to violence—that is, gender is constituted in terms of negligible and
unredressed injury and the propensity for violence. The en-gendering of race, as it is refracted
through Cobb’s scale of subjective value, entails the denial of sexual violation as a form of injury
while asserting the prevalence of sexual violence due to the rapacity of the Negro. While Cobb’s
consideration of sexual violation initially posits gender differences within the enslaved
community in terms of female victim and male perpetrator, ultimately the “strong passions” of
the Negro—in this instance, lust and lasciviousness—ultimately annul such distinctions and
concomitantly any concerns about “the violation of the person of a female slave.” Since,
according to Cobb, blacks were endowed less with sexuality than with criminality, they were in
1
need of discipline rather than protection, since as sexual subjects they were beyond the pale of
the law and outside the boundaries of the decent and the nameable.
In George v. State, George, a slave, was indicted for rape under a statute making it a
crime to have sex with a child under ten years of age. The Mississippi Supreme Court
overturned a lower-court ruling that convicted George for the rape of a female slave under ten
years old and sentenced him to death by hanging. The attorney for George cited Cobb’s Law of
Slavery in his argument before the court, declaring that “the crime or rape does not exist in this
State between African slaves. Our laws recognize no marital rights as between slaves; their
sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners. The regulations of law, as to the white
race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to
slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violation of a female slave by a male slave
would be mere assault and battery.”63 According to George’s attorney, the sexual
arrangements of the captive community were so different from those of the dominant order
that they were beyond the reach of the law and best left to the regulation of slave owners. The
Mississippi Supreme Court concluded that based on a “careful examination of our legislation on
this subject, we are satisfied that there is no act which embraces either the attempted or actual
commission of a rape by a slave on a female slave. . . . Masters and slaves cannot be governed
by the same common system of laws: so different are their positions, rights, and duties.” The
lower court’s judgment was reversed, the indictment quashed, and the defendant discharged
on the grounds that “this indictment cannot be sustained, either at common law or under our
statutes. It charges no offence known to either system.” The opinion held that slaves were not
subject to the protection of common law and that earlier cases in which whites were
prosecuted for the murder of slaves under common law were founded on “unmeaning twaddle
. . . ‘natural law,’ ‘civilization *97 and Christian enlightenment,’ in amending propio vigore, the
rigor of the common law.”
If subjectivity is calculated in accordance with degrees of injury and sexual violation is
not within the scope of offenses that affected slave existence, what are the consequences of
this repression and disavowal in regard to gender and sexuality? Does this callous
circumscription of black sentience define the condition of the slave female, or does it challenge
the adequacy of gender as a way of making sense of the inscription and exploitation of captive
bodies? Put differently, what place does the enslaved female occupy within the admittedly
circumscribed scope of black existence or slave personhood? As a consequence of this
disavowal of offense, is her scope of existence even more restricted? Does she exist exclusively
as property? Is she insensate? What are the repercussions of this construction of person for the
meaning of “woman”? . . .
To return to the central issues, the law’s selective recognition of slave personhood in
regard to issues of injury and protection failed to acknowledge the matter of sexual violation,
specifically rape, and thereby defined the identity of the slave female by the negation of
sentience, an invulnerability to sexual violation, and the negligibility of her injuries. However, it
is important that the decriminalization of rape not be understood as dispossessing the enslaved
of female gender, but in terms of differential production of gendered identity or, more
specifically, the adequacy or meaning of gender in this context. Therefore, what is at stake here
is not maintaining gender as an identitarian category but rather examining gender formation in
relation to property relations, the sexual economy of slavery, and the calculation of injury,
2
The weighing of person and property—the limited recognition of the slave as person, to
the extent that it did not interfere with the full enjoyment of the slave as *98 thing—endowed
the enslaved with limited protections and made them vulnerable to injury, precisely because
the recognition of person and the calibration of subjectivity were consonant with the
imperatives of the institution. The protection of property (defined narrowly by work capacity
and the value of capital), the public good (the maintenance of black subordination), and the
maintenance and reproduction of the institution of slavery determined the restricted scope of
personhood and the terms of recognition.64 These concerns also governed the regulation and
nullification of mothering and the protections extended to white women in order to control
their sexual conduct and consolidate black subordination.65 The affiliation of sexuality,
property, and injury and the particular determination of “offences to existence” and alienable
or extricable features of the slave person are illuminated by the negation of black parenting and
the law’s protection of white women.
3
___________________________________________________________________________
Brooks, G. (1963) The Lovers of the Poor, Selected Poems
___________________________________________________________________________
arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault
Anew and dearly in the innocence
With which they baffle nature. Who are full,
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching-post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is—something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,
Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
4
Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left,
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars
Must presently restore them. When they’re done
With dullards and distortions of this fistic
Patience of the poor and put-upon.
They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as
Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”
Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich
Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered. . . .)
Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.
Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,
In horror, behind a substantial citizeness
Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.
Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, softEyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .
They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,”
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’
5
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!—
Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.
Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.
6
___________________________________________________________________________
Marks, S. (2009) “Human Rights and the Bottom Billion” 1 European Human Rights Law
Review pp. 37-49. Excerpts from pp. 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45
___________________________________________________________________________
(p.37) Global poverty is today widely discussed as a human rights issue. But how should it be
approached? In addressing this question, the present paper examines the influential work of
Paul Collier, Thomas Pogge, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. While
each contributes significantly to our understanding, it is argued that none attaches sufficient
importance to the relationality and systematicity of privilege and deprivation.
In his recent book The Bottom Billion development economist Paul Collier writes of the
billion or so people who live in the world's very poorest countries. The statistics for these places
are grim even by the standards of states that are not affluent: average life expectancy is 50, as
against 67 elsewhere in the developing world; infant mortality is 14 percent, as against 4 per
cent in other developing countries; and the proportion of children with symptoms of long-term
malnutrition is 36 per cent, while in other developing countries it is 20 per cent. But for Collier
the point about these societies which justifies concentrating on their distinctive problems is not
just that they are exceptionally poor; it is also that the prognosis for them is exceptionally
bleak, inasmuch as their economies are failing to grow. Indeed, for much of the time since the
1980s their economies have been in accelerating decline, with the result that today they are
about where they were in 1970. Collier identifies 58 countries as being in this situation, most,
though not all, of them in Africa, and he argues that it is they which today constitute the “real
challenge of development”. Rather than thinking, as we have been accustomed to do, in terms
of a rich world and a poor world, he contends that we need to start thinking in terms of a rich
world, a developing world and a world that is failing to develop, home to his eponymous
“bottom billion”.
(p.38) ……..Perhaps the most conspicuous context for discussions of global poverty
within human rights circles is the effort by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights to elaborate and promote a “human rights approach to poverty reduction”,…..
Yet the idea that human rights may have something to do with poverty and its reduction
is certainly not confined to this project of the OHCHR; discussions on the subject unfold within
many settings, including academic literature. In a further section of the paper, I shall highlight
the writings of philosopher Thomas Pogge on the “human rights of the global poor”. Pogge's
scholarship is instructive because he helps us to see what is missing in the analyses of both
Collier and the OHCHR. Alongside their considerable contributions, it becomes apparent that
they leave out of account the role of international law in establishing the very conditions within
which poverty can occur………
The bottom billion
…..Collier's central claim is that the bottom billion countries are not just the poorest but also
differ from the rest of the developing world in having economies that are failing to grow, the
first half of his book is devoted to explaining why this is so. In his assessment, the explanation is
that bottom billion countries are caught in a series of traps. He does not argue that poverty is
itself a trap; rather, the traps have to do with features of the countries concerned…….
7
*39...Collier plainly believes that international law can play a role in helping the bottom
billion countries to escape from the traps in which they are caught, but it needs recasting and
supplementing. His recommendations engage long-running debates over humanitarian
intervention, investment protection and the democratic entitlement, among many other
things…Yet if the bottom billion are to be helped to escape, it is surely necessary to understand
how these particular circumstances come to constitute traps--what it is that makes it possible
for them to operate in this manner. One aspect of this concerns international law…….
*41 Human rights and poverty reduction…….
…………[T]he Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights began in 2001 to consider
the elaboration of guidelines on a “human rights approach to poverty alleviation”. This was
seen to dovetail with the broader effort, launched by the UN Secretary-General in 1997, to
integrate human rights into all the Organization's activities, including its activities in the sphere
of development. Draft Guidelines on a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction were
prepared in 2002, and in 2004 a report was issued setting out the conceptual framework which
informed the Guidelines and which, in turn, they were intended to promote.9 It is on this
report, entitled “Human Rights and Poverty Reduction: A Conceptual Framework”,…..
The report starts by noting that the move to integrate human rights into poverty
reduction strategies, as advocated and elaborated within development agencies, draws on the
very considerable legitimacy of human rights. This is seen to derive not only from the moral
authority of norms that are rooted in considerations of human dignity, but also from the fact
that human rights norms are widely endorsed in all regions of the world, and that all states of
the world are parties to at least one human rights treaty…….
*42 In this approach, the central issue is not just economic growth, but the extent to
which each individual has command over economic resources…….At the same time, and more
generally, what is significant is the basic idea that poverty reduction is not simply a matter of
charity, prudence or good practice, but can instead be claimed as a right that imposes legal
duties on governments and others……
……….Collier adopts an approach that stresses economic growth, and that considers global
poverty in largely aggregative terms. His analysis also has a location-specific dimension that sits
uneasily with the universality of human rights. In contrast, the OHCHR insists that human rights
have multifaceted relevance to poverty reduction, and that approaches to development must
take into account a range of rights-related matters, among them the principle of nondiscrimination…….
At another level, however, these two texts may not be so very far apart. One thing, at
any rate, that both share is the sense of global poverty as a problem with its roots largely in
domestic factors. That is to say, the issue for both Collier and the OHCHR is bad policies,
despotic leaders, and corrupt elites, along with lack of accountability, lack of expertise,
deficient public institutions, geographical disadvantage, and persistent civil strife……
*43 The human rights of the global poor
The OHCHR's report exemplifies one approach to global poverty as a human rights issue.
Another approach can be illustrated with reference to the work of Thomas Pogge. In a series of
writings Pogge has put forward the argument that, in the context of persistent, widespread and
often life-threatening poverty, human rights are both “recognized and violated by international
law”. By this he means that the international recognition and protection of rights, including
8
rights to the basic necessities for life, coexist with a normative and institutional order that
systematically undermines those rights so that at the same time international law contributes
to their violation. In defending this claim, he insists that poverty cannot be explained by
reference to national or local factors alone. Apart from other considerations, the “domestic
poverty thesis”,11 as he calls it, leaves out of account the extent to which current inequalities
are historical, and especially colonial, legacies……
*44…..For all the attention lavished in development economics on the phenomenon of
the resource curse, Pogge observes that the global order is standardly held “fixed as a given
background”;14 the role is rarely considered of the “global rules that grant the resource
privilege to any group in power, irrespective of its domestic illegitimacy”.15 I referred earlier to
the way Collier's “trap of being landlocked with bad neighbours” is mediated by international
legal norms, and here we see that the same applies to his “natural resource trap”. Indeed, the
same applies to each of the traps in which the bottom billion countries are caught; each can be
seen as partly set by international law if only we choose to look.
Pogge's claim is that the international order which includes these norms is effectively
imposed on the global poor, and that this imposition “constitutes a massive violation of the
human right to basic necessities--a violation for which the governments and electorates of the
more powerful countries bear primary responsibility”…..
*45….Citing the current toll of an historically unprecedented 18 million poverty-related
deaths per year, he contends that today's global poverty represents “arguably the largest
[human rights] violation ever committed in human history”. In analytical terms, he contends
that this violation implicates even negative obligations. That is to say, the issue is not just a
failure to prevent avoidable harm, but an active contribution to its incidence; it is not just the
lack of aid, but the ongoing need for aid. As he explains, “the poor are systematically
impoverished by present institutional arrangements and have been so impoverished for a long
time during which our advantage and their disadvantage have been compounded”. It follows
for him that the collective obligation of the rich world is to change those arrangements, and his work
includes discussion of possible reform initiatives. ….
How does this analysis compare with the report by the OHCHR? Again it is important to note the
significant differences in their respective projects. The OHCHR addresses development agencies, urging
them to take into account human rights and, in so doing, to pay particular attention to a series of
fundamental norms, principles and ideas drawn from international human rights law and the experience
of the institutions associated with it. For his part, Pogge addresses the world at large, and particularly
people in rich countries, trying to make them aware of how global poverty constitutes a violation of
human rights and how they and their governments are themselves complicit in that violation. At the
same time, there is obviously shared subject matter insofar as both write about global poverty as an
issue of human rights.
In this regard, it is notable that, while the OHCHR leaves aside the question of how the
international system may contribute to the production of poverty, Pogge takes that as his
central theme……Pogge leaves some important questions unanswered. What are the dynamics
of the process he describes? How is it that disadvantage and advantage are compounded?
And is this outcome purely fortuitous, or are there systemic logics at work? ......
p.49 ....Collier's analysis is notably lacking in attention to the relational dimensions of global
poverty. This is epitomised in the notion of the “bottom billion” itself--a number that is
relative (to the top or next billion), and yet, as a concept, curiously autonomous and nonrelational: these poorest of the poor are simply there, a feature on our analytical landscape.
9
And just as in his work all eyes are on the bottom billion and what we might do to help them,
so too in human rights circles the focus is on the victims and on the rights and correlative
obligations they may assert. Those who benefit from current arrangements remain comfortably
out of view.
Bhambra, G.K. ( 2021) “Narrating Inequality, Eliding Empire” 72 British Journal of Sociology
69-78. Excerpts from pp. 69, 71, 72
___________________________________________________________________________
*69 Piketty opens Capital and Ideology—the successor volume to the blockbuster Capital in
the Twenty-First Century—with the following line: “Every human society must justify its
inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in
danger of collapse” (2020, p. 1). It is a curious formulation, since it presupposes both that
inequalities can be justified and that the “political and social edifice” is itself built
independently of its legitimation. Piketty goes on to write, “every ideology, no matter how
extreme it may seem in its defense of inequality, expresses a certain idea of social justice”
(2020, p. 9). Of course, a more nuanced sociological account would ask how the edifice is
constructed to withstand challenge and to question the ways in which ideologies are entwined
with power. Piketty, however, is interested in setting out the forms of inequality that (p.70)
structure different nations and examining the ideologies used to justify those inequalities.
Further, he seeks to examine the contemporary implications of these processes so that we are
better able to transform them, in the future, toward more egalitarian ends.
The central problem animating the volume is that the meritocratic narratives that have
come to justify modern inequality are looking ever more fragile. Further, he argues that if the
economic system they are justifying is not radically transformed, we are looking at the collapse
of the global economy and a future defined by xenophobic populism. In order to avoid such an
outcome, Piketty continues, it is necessary to understand the weaknesses of such narratives
and, for this, it is important to adopt a transnational approach and one that is historically
informed. This would enable the construction of “a new universalist egalitarian narrative” and
one that would, in turn, provide the basis for “a new participatory socialism for the twentyfirst century” (2020, p. 3). In these terms, Piketty, then, is making a justificatory argument for
less
inequality, and not simply addressing modern justifications of inequality…….
……….The key issue… is that Piketty organizes his historical comparative analysis in terms of
inequality within nations. Yet, the polities he is discussing were rarely nations over the long
durée. Rather, they were imperial formations constituted by a colonizing state and the
territories and populations that were incorporated. In fact, the “nations” that Piketty discusses,
only become nations after decolonization. The relations between colonizer and colonized are
also significant in the production and reproduction of inequalities both within countries and
between them. Without an adequate understanding of global colonial entanglements, I argue
that it is not possible to put forward a credible future alternative to current inequalities……..
*71 In his discussion of slavery, for example, Piketty starts by stating that “slave
societies existed long before European colonialism” and then goes on to comment that his
focus will be on “the ways in which slavery was abolished in the modern era” (2020, p. 203).
There are a scant couple of pages addressing slavery in ancient societies, serfdom, and modern
slavery, before a more extensive discussion of abolition covering the rest of the chapter. There
is no significant discussion of what slavery actually was and how the modern form of it—chattel
slavery—was established. There is very little discussion of the revenue brought into European
countries through their involvement in the trade in human beings, their use of enslaved labor
10
on plantations, or the impact of the expansion of these markets for the sale of their goods.
There is also no explicit discussion of what idea of social justice was embedded in the
legitimation of the regimes of slavery or colonialism given that Piketty earlier states that “every
ideology … expresses a certain idea of social justice” (2020, p. 9). What constitutes (or, what
could constitute) the legitimacy of modern slavery as a regime of inequality? Do those who
were enslaved need to feel that their bondage is justified? Piketty does not address such
questions and nor is there any discussion of why those who were enslaved, or the societies
from which they were taken, were not thought to have anything of significance to say about the
processes of enslavement or their own humanity (see Grovogui, 2009).
Given that modern chattel slavery entails the commodification of the laborer and his or
her use as property, it is more appropriately understood as part of the proprietarian regime and
not a regime separate from it (see Bhambra & Holmwood, 2018). Nearly all of Piketty's
discussion of slavery is about its abolition, which, in turn, is discussed primarily in terms of the
compensation to be paid to those who had owned other people. While abolition is presented as
a consequence of reforms deriving from the ideology of equality, Piketty also argues that given
that those who were enslaved were private property, it was appropriate that slave owners be
compensated for their loss. He is largely silent on the justice of reparations for those who were
enslaved and lost property in their own persons ……
*72 There are similar issues with Piketty's conceptualization of colonialism which
presents colonial societies as separate from proprietarian ones. He turns to addressing colonial
societies by stating that the “forms of domination and inequality … were less extreme than
slavery” (2020, p. 252). He then goes on to identify two ages of European colonialism. The first
from 1500 to 1850 which was characterized by “military domination and forced displacement
and/or extermination of populations” (2020, p. 253). The second was from 1850 to the 1960s
and, he suggests, “is often said to have been kinder and gentler” although he accepts that
“violence was scarcely absent from the second phase” (2020, p. 253). However, his focus on
colonial societies is on the ideologies that sustained forms of inequality within societies that
were colonized. Not on the inequalities produced through colonialism. As such, he focuses on
caste in India, for example, as opposed to accounting for the processes of colonial drain that
enriched Britain as they impoverished India….
In contrast to Piketty, I would argue that colonialism cannot be understood as a
category separate to that of proprietarianism. This is because it is constituted by the
proprietarian regime taking other territories and populations into private ownership and
through its enforcement of trade relations and the use of coerced labor on colonial plantations.
Are those who are subject to colonial rule willing subjects? Do they consent to their
colonization and exploitation? By not even raising such issues—issues that pertain to questions
of legitimacy which are, in turn, seen to be integral to the framework as otherwise presented—
points to the inadequacy of the conceptualization at work here. For example, while Piketty
acknowledges that the Chinese and Indian share of global manufacturing output, which had
been 53% in 1800, had fallen to 5% by 1900 he does not see this as necessarily linked to the
historical processes of colonialism and its determination of the modern world. Rather, he suggests
that “it would be absurd to view this as the only possible trajectory leading to the Industrial
Revolution and modern prosperity… one can imagine other historical trajectories” (2020, p. 381).
The modern world, it seems, need not have been produced through slavery and colonialism. But the
11
point is surely to account for its actual historical trajectory not conjecture that it need not have
happened this way and imagine other ones? The purpose of such conjecture is to imagine a logic of
proprietarianism independently of slavery and colonialism. In this way, the actual trajectory is elided
for the present as something in need of redress.
As such, Piketty's regimes of inequality implicitly justify unequal treatment of others without
including them in the discussion of that treatment…..
12
___________________________________________________________________________
Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Excerpts from pp.
163, 172-173, 174, 178,179, 180, 181,182, 183, 185
___________________________________________________________________________
*163 Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable
point of reference for a great deal of feminist . . .*172 theory and politics. These constructs of
identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics
itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests,
the perspectives, of “women.” . . . Or is “the body” itself shaped by political forces with
strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex?...
From Interiority to Gender Performatives
. . . That disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the
interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive
domain. . . . gen- *173 der discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and
gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or
sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender—indeed, where none of these
dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another. When the disorganization
and disaggregation of the field of bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual
coherence, it seems that the expressive model loses its descriptive force. That regulatory ideal
is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating
the sexual field that it purports to describe.
. . . Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense
that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications
manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. . . . In other
words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and
organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of
sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. . . . *174 The
displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core”
precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated
notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity…..
. . . *178 Discrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within
contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right. . .
Consider that a sedimentation of gender norms produces the peculiar phenomenon of a
“natural sex” or a “real woman” or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and
that this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in
reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes existing in a binary
relation to one another. . . .
*179 Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from
which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted
in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. . . . acts, in the possibility of a failure to
repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding
identity as a politically tenuous construction.
13
*180 . . . That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means
that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also
constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the
performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames
of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality….
*181 Conclusion: From Parody to Politics
. . . The feminist “we” is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its
purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and
constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it
simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the “we,” however,
is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the
category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and
opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself.
. . . My argument is that there need not be a “doer behind the deed,” but that the
“doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed. This is not a return to an existential
theory of the self as constituted through its acts, for the existential theory maintains a
prediscursive structure for both the self and its acts. It is precisely the discursively variable
construction of each in and through the other that has interested me here.
*182 The question of locating “agency” is usually associated with the viability of the
“subject,” where the “subject” is understood to have some stable existence prior to the cultural
field that it negotiates. Or, if the subject is culturally constructed, it is nevertheless vested with
an agency, usually figured as the capacity for reflexive mediation, that remains intact regardless
of its cultural embeddedness. On such a model, “culture” and “discourse” mire the subject, but
do not constitute that subject. This move to qualify and enmire the preexisting subject has
appeared necessary to establish a point of agency that is not fully determined by that culture
and discourse. And yet, this kind of reasoning falsely presumes (a) agency can only be
established through recourse to a prediscursive “I,” even if that “I” is found in the midst of a
discursive convergence, and (b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by
discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency….
*183 What discursive tradition establishes the “I” and its “Other” in an epistemological
confrontation that subsequently decides where and how questions of knowability and agency
are to be determined? What kinds of agency are foreclosed through the positing of an
epistemological subject precisely because the rules and practices that govern the invocation of
that subject and regulate its agency in advance are ruled out as sites of analysis and critical
intervention? That the epistemological point of departure is in no sense inevitable is naively
and pervasively confirmed by the mundane operations of ordinary language…that regard the
subject/object dichotomy as a strange and contingent, if not violent, philosophical imposition.
…*185 The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because
signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both
conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing
effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat;
“agency,” then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. . . .
14
___________________________________________________________________________
Spivak, G. (1998) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, C.
Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Excerpts pp. 66, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 102
___________________________________________________________________________
*66 Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an
interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of
pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often
providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is
narrativized by the law, political economy and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject
pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations’. The much-publicized critique of the sovereign
subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. I will argue for this conclusion by considering a text
by two great practitioners of the critique: ‘Intellectuals and power: a conversation between
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deluze’ . . .
*75 . . . This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations,
belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for
contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit
the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or
uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing
the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of
Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject
could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and scientific
production, but also by the institution of the law. . .
*76 The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely
orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.
This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious
Subject-ivity. . . .
This is not to describe ‘the way things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of history
as imperialism as the best version of history.26 It is, rather, to offer an account of how an
explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one. To elaborate on this,
let us consider briefly the underpinnings of the British codification of Hindu Law…
Here… is a schematic summary of the epistemic violence of the codification of Hindu Law……..
At the end of the eighteenth century, Hindu law, insofar as it can be described as a
unitary system, operated in terms of four texts that ‘staged’ a four-part episteme defined by
the subject’s use of memory . . . *77 Legal theorists and practitioners were not in any given case
certain if this structure described the body of law or four ways of settling a dispute. The
legitimation of the polymorphous structure of legal performance, ‘internally’ noncoherent and
open at both ends, through a binary vision, is the narrative of codification I offer as an example
of epistemic violence.
The narrative of the stabilization and codification of Hindu law is less well known than
the story of Indian education, so it might be well to start there.28 Consider the often-quoted
programmatic lines from Macaulay's infamous ‘Minute on Indian education’ (1835): ‘We must
at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions
whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
15
opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular
dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the
Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to
the great mass of the population.’29 The education of colonial subjects complements their
production in law. . . .
*78 Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent,
silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among
the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to
Foucault and Deleuze…. the oppressed, if given the chance, ….and on the way to solidarity
through alliance politics….., can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the
following question: on the other side of the international division of labor from socialized
capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education
supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?
Antonio Gramsci's work on the ‘subaltern classes’ …is concerned with the intellectual’s
role in the subaltern’s cultural and political movement into the hegemony. This movement
must be made to determine the production of history as narrative (of truth)....,Gramsci
considers the movement of historical-political economy in Italy within what can be seen as an
allegory of reading taken from or prefiguring an international division of labor.36 Yet an
account of the phased development of the subaltern is thrown out of joint when his cultural
macrology is operated, however remotely, by the epistemic interference with legal and
disciplinary definitions accompanying the imperialist project. …..
The first part of my proposition—that the phased development of the subaltern is
complicated by the imperialist project—is confronted by a collective of intellectuals who may
be called the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group.37 ……Their project is to rethink Indian colonial
historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant *79 insurgencies
during the colonial occupation. . . .
*80 . . . In subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social and
disciplinary inscription, a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical
textual practice of differences. …
. . . For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no
unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is
not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been
traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual. In the slightly dated
language of the Indian group, the question becomes, How can we touch the consciousness of
the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the
subaltern speak? . . .
*82 It is well known that the notion of the feminine (rather than the subaltern of
imperialism) has been used in a similar way within deconstructive criticism and within certain
varieties of feminist criticism.46 In the former case, a figure of ‘woman’ is at issue, one whose
minimal predication as indeterminate is already available to the phallocentric tradition.
Subaltern historiography raises questions of method that would prevent it from using such a
ruse. For the ‘figure’ of woman, the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by
women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge. Subaltern
historiography must confront the impossibility of such gestures. The narrow epistemic violence
16
of imperialism gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the possibility of an
episteme.47
Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is
doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of
the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence’. It is, rather, that, both as
object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of
gender keeps the male dominant. If, in *83 the context of colonial production, the subaltern
has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.. . .
*102 Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation,
the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling
which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and
modernization. .
17
Jackson, Z. (2020) Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World. Excerpts
from pp. 7-9
___________________________________________________________________________
*7 about a world “out there” but also how we “know ourselves.” Epistemology is a problem not
of the past but one that is constituent with our being.
By the nineteenth century, the Chain of Being’s physical anthropology, using human and
animal physical measurements, sealed the connection between Africans and apes as scientific
fact. One must only recall the manner in which Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus,
was displayed for the British and French public as both pornographic spectacle and scientific
specimen (Gilman 88). Her physiognomic characteristics—posterior and genitals—were
presumed to signal a difference in sexuality that was pronounced enough to further divide the
categories of “female” and “woman”: an idealized white femininity became paradigmatic of
“woman” through the abjection of the perceived African “female” (Gilman 83–85). Female,
rather than woman, African femaleness is paradoxically placed under the sign of absence, lack,
and pathology in order to present an idealized western European bourgeois femininity as the
normative embodiment of womanhood (Gilman 85–108).
In this context, the potential recognition of womanhood in blackness, and especially
black femininity, is placed in tension with the discourses on black female sexuality. Hortense
Spillers put it this way: “In the universe of unreality and exaggeration, the black female is, if
anything, a creature of sex, but sexuality touches her nowhere . . . the female has so much
sexual potential that she has none at all that anybody is ready to recognize at the level of
culture” (Black, White, and in Color 155, emphasis in original). The perpetual specter of black
female lack in the realm of culturally and historically produced femininity, at the register of
both performativity and morphology, produces “the African female” as paradigmatically
indeterminate in terms of gender and paradigmatically the human’s limit case.
The spectacularization of the posterior has perhaps blinded our critical attention to the
manner with which ontologizing racial characterization not only divides and stratifies gender
but also calls *8 into question the very meaning of sexual difference. Shifting critical attention
from the posterior to the breast, I demonstrate that racism not only posits cleavages in
womanhood such that black womanhood is imagined to be a gender apart (an “other” gender)
but also an “other” sex. Additionally, antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-called
biological sex is modulated by “culture.” ……Thus, antiblack formulations of gender and
sexuality are actually essential rather than subsidiary to the metaphysical figuration of matter,
objects, and animals that recent critical theory hopes to dislodge. I argue the plasticization of
black(ened) people at the register of sign and materiality is central to the prevailing logics and
praxis of the human and sex/gender. Recent scholarship in black queer theory suggests we can
no longer presume that gender is a metonym for “woman” and sexuality a metonym for
“queer.” The wanton manipulation of gendered and sexual codes is essential to the production
of antiblackness generally, irrespective of self-identification.6 Queer theory scholars have
argued that the masculine–feminine dynamic is on the register of the symbolic, rather than the
biological, even though it masquerades as if the borders dividing masculine from feminine map
neatly onto the “natural” polarity of sex.7 What feminism has not sufficiently interrogated is
18
the manner in which the masculine–feminine dichotomy is racialized. We have neither
adequately identified that racialization is intrinsic to the legibility of its codes and grammar,
namely that antiblackness constitutes and disrupts sex/gender constructs, nor determined the
consequence this has for the matter of the sexed body.
Such a predicament creates conditions of gendered and sexual anxiety and instability. As
Spillers states, “[I]n the historic outline of dominance, the respective subject-positions of
‘female’ and ‘male’ *9 adhere to no symbolic integrity,” as their meaning can be stripped or
appropriated arbitrarily by power, as black females’ claim to “womanhood and femininity still
tends to rest too solidly on the subtle and shifting calibrations of a liberal ideology” (“Mama’s”
204, 223). Thus, while codes of gender are cultural rather than prediscursive, one must also
attend to the matter of the body, as the body’s materiality is thought to provide the observable
“fact” of animality.
The African’s “failure” to achieve humanity has historically been thought to be rooted in
“the body,” in an insatiable appetite that made it impossible for the African to rise above “the
body,” “the organ,” in order to come back to itself in self-reflection, never achieving the
distance required in order to contemplate the self (Mbembe 190). Gender, and especially
sexuality, was leveraged against counterclaims acknowledging black reason and civility. For
thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, black gender and black kinship stood as an impediment to
black progress. So, while it seems that the human must be reconsidered, a critical engagement
with the discourses of gender and sexuality must be coincident to our interrogation of both
dominant and emergent praxes of being.
At this time, most feminist scholars can agree that an “intersectional” approach to the
question of subjectivity is required, but scholars have not clarified how the different elements
of subjectivity braid together historically and culturally……. Our task would be to take seriously
the particularization of gender and sexuality in black(ened) people in the context of a
humanism that in its desire to universalize, ritualistically posits black(female)ness as opacity,
inversion, and limit. In such a context, the black body is characterized by a plasticity, whereby
raciality arbitrarily remaps black(ened) gender and sexuality, nonteleologically and
nonbinaristically, with fleeting adherence to normativized heteropatriarchal codes. In such a
context of paradoxical (un)gendering, and by gendering I mean humanization, power only takes
direction from its own shifting exigencies—a predicament that might be described as chaos.
19
___________________________________________________________________________
Fineman, M.A. (2008) "The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human
Condition" 20 (1) Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 1. Excerpts from pp. 8 – 12.
___________________________________________________________________________
[p. 8] In discussions of public responsibility, the concept of vulnerability is sometimes
used to define groups of fledgling or stigmatized subjects, designated as "populations."'
Vulnerability is typically associated with victimhood, deprivation, dependency, or pathology.
For example, public health discourse refers to "vulnerable populations," such as those who are
infected with HIV-AIDS. Groups of persons living in poverty or confined in prisons or other state
institutions are often labeled as vulnerable populations. Children and the elderly are
prototypical examples of more sympathetic vulnerable populations.
In contrast, I want to claim the term "vulnerable" for its potential in describing a
universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition that must be at the heart of our
concept of social and state responsibility. Vulnerability thus freed from its limited and negative
associations is a powerful [p.9] conceptual tool with the potential to define an obligation for
the state to ensure a richer and more robust guarantee of equality than is currently afforded
under the equal protection model.
This vulnerability approach both expands upon and complements earlier work I have
done in theorizing dependency. The technique is to focus on a concept or term in common use,
but also grossly under-theorized, and thus ambiguous. Even when the term is laden with
negative associations, the ambiguity provides an opportunity to begin to explore and excavate
the unarticulated and complex relationships inherent but latent in the term. Thus reconsidered,
the concept of vulnerability can act as a heuristic device, pulling us back to examine hidden
assumptions and biases that shaped its original social and cultural meanings. Conceiving of
vulnerability in this way renders it valuable in constructing critical perspectives on political and
societal institutions, including law. Vulnerability raises new issues, poses different questions,
and opens up new avenues for critical exploration.
Vulnerability initially should be understood as arising from our embodiment, which
carries with it the ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune from mildly adverse
to catastrophically devastating events, whether accidental, intentional, or otherwise.
Individuals can attempt to lessen the risk or mitigate the impact of such events, but they cannot
eliminate their possibility. Understanding vulnerability begins with the realization that many
such events are ultimately beyond human control.
Our embodied humanity carries with it the ever-constant possibility of dependency as a
result of disease, epidemics, resistant viruses, or other biologically-based catastrophes. Our
bodies are also vulnerable to other forces in our physical environment: There is the constant
possibility that we can be injured and undone by errant weather systems, such as those that
produce flood, drought, famine, and fire. These are "natural" disasters beyond our individual
control to prevent. Our bodily vulnerability is enhanced by the realization that [p. 10] should we
succumb to illness or injury there may be accompanying economic and institutional harms as a
result of disruption of existing relationships.
Because we are positioned differently within a web of economic and institutional
relationships, our vulnerabilities range in magnitude and potential at the individual level.
20
Undeniably universal, human vulnerability is also particular: it is experienced uniquely by each
of us and this experience is greatly influenced by the quality and quantity of resources we
possess or can command. Significantly, the realization that no individual can avoid vulnerability
entirely spurs us to look to societal institutions for assistance. Of course, society cannot
eradicate our vulnerability either. However, society can and does mediate, compensate, and
lessen our vulnerability through programs, institutions, and structures. Therefore, because both
our personal and our social lives are marked and shaped by vulnerability, a vulnerability
analysis must have both individual and institutional components.
A. The Vulnerable Subject
Understanding the significance, universality, and constancy of vulnerability mandates
that politics, ethics, and law be fashioned around a complete, comprehensive vision of the
human experience if they are to meet the needs of real-life subjects. Currently, dominant
political and legal theories are built around a universal human subject defined in the liberal
tradition. These theories presume the liberal subject is a competent social actor capable of
playing multiple and concurrent societal roles: the employee, the employer, the spouse, the
parent, the consumer, the manufacturer, the citizen, the taxpayer, and so on. This liberal
subject informs our economic, legal, and political principles. It is indispensable to the prevailing
ideologies of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility, through which society is
conceived as constituted by self-interested individuals with the capacity to manipulate and
manage their independently acquired and overlapping resources.
The legal metaphor encapsulating this vision of societal organization is "contract."
Liberal subjects have the ability to negotiate contract terms, assessing their options and making
rational choices. They consent to such agreements in the course of fulfilling society's mandate
that they assume personal responsibility for themselves and for their dependants. Privacy
principles that restrain the state and its institutions from interfering with the [p.11] liberal
subjects' entitlements to autonomy and liberty depend on this presumed competence and
capability.
Vulnerability analysis questions the idea of a liberal subject, suggesting that the
vulnerable subject is a more accurate and complete universal figure to place at the heart of
social policy. There have been many critiques of the liberal subject, most of which focus on
autonomy. For instance, feminist scholars have scrutinized and criticized the ways in which
dominant theory and popular politics idealize notions of independence, autonomy, and selfsufficiency that are empirically unrealistic and unrealizable. Feminist critics, specifically in
bringing dependency and care work into light and under scrutiny, have offered a model of
interdependence in which the liberal subject is enmeshed in a web of relationships and
perceived as dependent upon them.
A vulnerability critique builds on these insights, but differs in several ways.
Vulnerability is a more encompassing concept and, for that reason, analyses centered
around vulnerability are more politically potent than those based on dependency. Because
dependency is episodic and shifts in degree on an individual level for most of us, mainstream
political and social theorists can and often do conveniently ignore it. In their hands,
dependency, if acknowledged at all, is merely a stage that the liberal subject has long ago
transcended or left behind and is, therefore, of no pressing theoretical interest. In addition,
society has historically dealt with dependency by relegating the burden of caretaking to the
21
family, which is located within a zone of privacy, beyond the scope of state concern absent
extraordinary family failures, such as abuse or neglect. Thus largely rendered invisible within
the family, dependency is comfortably and mistakenly assumed to be adequately managed for
the vast majority of people.
By contrast, understood as a state of constant possibility of harm, vulnerability cannot
be hidden. Further, while institutions such as the family may provide some shelter, they are
unable to eliminate individual vulnerability and are themselves vulnerable structures
susceptible to harm and change.
Because vulnerability is ever-present and enduring, institutional as well as individual, it
suggests a critique of dominant modes of thinking about inequality that is at once
complementary to but more powerful than dependency. My argument is not for vulnerability to
supplant dependency, for they each reveal different and important things. Rather, the assertion
is that vulnerability analysis may ultimately prove more theoretically powerful.
In addition, the vulnerability perspective calls attention to another problematic
characteristic of the liberal subject: S/he can only be presented as an adult. As such, the liberal
subject stands not only outside of the passage of time, but also outside of human experience.
The construction of the adult [p.12] liberal subject captures only one possible developmental
stage-the least vulnerable-from among the many possible stages an actual individual might pass
through if s/he lives a "normal" lifespan. We must confront this foundational flaw in the liberal
model if we are to develop legal and social policies that reflect the lived realities of human
subjects.
The vulnerable subject approach does what the one-dimensional liberal subject
approach cannot: it embodies the fact that human reality encompasses a wide range of
differing and interdependent abilities over the span of a lifetime. The vulnerability approach
recognizes that individuals are anchored at each end of their lives by dependency and the
absence of capacity. Of course, between these ends, loss of capacity and dependence may also
occur, temporarily for many and permanently for some as a result of disability or illness.
Constant and variable throughout life, individual vulnerability encompasses not only damage
that has been done in the past and speculative harms of the distant future, but also the
possibility of immediate harm. We are beings who live with the ever- present possibility that
our needs and circumstances will change. On an individual level, the concept of vulnerability
(unlike that of liberal autonomy) captures this present potential for each of us to become
dependent based upon our persistent susceptibility to misfortune and catastrophe.
22
___________________________________________________________________________
Bernstein, E. (2018) Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom. Excerpts
from pp. 107, 109-112, 115 -118
___________________________________________________________________________
*107 Although the sale of sexual services is currently illegal in Thailand, the Thai government
does little to curb the existence of businesses that cater to sex tourists.31 In
fact, the government has historically supported sex tourism because of its military and
economic positioning in the area……..
*109 Preconditioned by anti-trafficking NGOs and popular representations of human trafficking,
reality tourists interpret commercial sex as a deplorable symptom of third-world poverty and
regard sex workers as victims-by- definition who lack meaningful voice and agency. The
erotically charged images of anti-trafficking campaigns and the reality tourists’ desires to save
worthy victims ironically mirror the humanitarian impulses that inflect some forms of sex
tourism—revealing a neocolonial formation that includes not only secular and evangelical
activists but also those clients of sex workers who also endeavor to “help.
Anti-Trafficking Tourism as Humanitarian Endeavor
Previous chapters have pointed to the various ways in which moral agendas around sex work
have become intricately interwoven with contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns. They have
also described anti-trafficking activists’ frequent equation of even adult and voluntary forms of
prostitution with “sex trafficking,” and the tendency among activists (including when their focus
is expanded to include forms of trafficking into other labor sectors) to single out sex trafficking
as the most devastating case. As commentators such as legal scholar Jennifer Chacón have *110
noted, “trafficking” as defined in current federal law and in international protocols could
conceivably encompass sweatshop labor, agricultural work, or even corporate crime, but it has
been the far less common instances of sexually trafficked women and girls that have stimulated
the most concern by evangelical Christians, prominent feminist activists, and the press.41
The tour operators on our trip frequently reproduced such assumptions and elisions, as
did the promotional materials for the tour. For instance, the photo that advertises the Thailand
tour in Global Exchange’s promotional materials invokes the simultaneous moral and erotic
allure of the enigmatic industry. It depicts an interracial couple embracing in a public balcony
ensconced in bright red light. The blurry image, never explicit in its caption of what viewers are
actually witnessing, suggests a clandestine peek into what is referred to in the accompanying
text as a photographic representation of “the global sex trade.”
The photo foregrounds the “redlight district” as evidence of the realities of human
trafficking, despite the fact that brothel-style sex establishments such as the one depicted have
all but disappeared from Thailand due to the aforementioned combination of changing local
market economies, public health concerns around controlling HIV/AIDS, and recent legislation
around prostitution.42 Furthermore, the district that the photo is meant to portray would likely
include a diverse range of beer bars, go-Go bars, massage parlors, and karaoke bars, all distinct
types of commercial establishments that employ sex workers to provide various forms of
entertainment. Reality tourists are thus not encouraged to see the vast array of possible labor
arrangements and power relations that encompass commercial sex work, or the particular
political and economic factors that make the situation of the Thai sex industry unique.
23
*111 Both the tour leaders and the participants on our reality tour shared the conviction
that commercial sex and human trafficking cannot be easily distinguished, a fact that became
clear during the initial round of group introductions. During our first dinner together, over a
table of Thai tourist staples like pad thai and Singha beer, the tour leaders asked participants to
introduce themselves and to briefly explain their interest in the anti-trafficking tour. Several of
the young women named popular movies on both sex work and sex trafficking, like Born into
Brothels and Taken, as their primary motivation for joining the tour.43 As one master’s degree
student from a university in central California eagerly shared: “We watched Born into Brothels
in one of my classes and that just opened the door for me.” The deeply felt significance of this
film was shared by a journalist from Atlanta, who echoed: “I am very passionate about ending
human trafficking. Born into Brothels was also the film that really introduced me to the sex
trade.” Other participants attributed their interest in the issue to the 2004 Hollywood film
Taken, which tells the story of an American teenager who is kidnapped on a vacation to Paris
and nearly forced to become a sex worker before she is rescued. Reflecting on them as a
“wake-up call” as to how pervasive global sex trafficking has become, another female tourist
noted that movies like Taken alerted her to “just how real” the problem of human trafficking
was.
The grounding of knowledge claims in sensationalist films about sex trafficking had thus
shaped tourists’ visions of “reality” and led them to broadly define all sex work as human
trafficking before they had even left US soil. Consistent with the findings of other studies of
humanitarian travel, the reality tour that travelers embarked on in Thailand did nothing to
disabuse them of preexisting feelings and beliefs. In her study of Canadian aid workers, Barbara
Heron emphasizes the important role played by Western media in the process of “othering”
Global South nations, and the ways in which it “normalizes our centering of ourselves in
relation to other people’s needs.”44 In her ethnographic research on volunteer tourism in
Guatemala and Ghana, Wanda Vrasti similarly found that tourists had established certain
expectations of travel prior to departure, including levels of poverty that deem a tourist
destination * 112 worthy of aid, and a gracious and welcoming recipient population in the host
country.
*115 One day of our anti-trafficking reality tour was subcontracted to the Mirror Art
Foundation, which agreed to provide us with an ecotour of the region, including an elephant
ride, dinner, and participation in a dance performance in an ethnic minority village. Our group
was driven down a bumpy, unpaved road located about twenty minutes from the nearest
highway and deposited at the foot of a local Akha community. One of six indigenous hill-tribe
populations in Thailand, the Akha are based in rural mountainous areas in the north, and many
Akha persons continue to be without Thai citizenship and thus ineligible for land, services, or
social protection under the law. Traditionally practitioners of subsistence farming, Akha
communities now engage in cash cropping for sale, and increasingly participate in the tourist
economy by hosting ecotours and producing ethnic handicrafts.55
As we disembarked from our van, half a dozen Akha women stood waiting at the
entrance to the village, adorned in colorfully woven headpieces and dresses, unveiling baskets
full of handicraft items for sale. After completing their purchases, our group was ushered to sit
in a giant circle of chairs where we were given the opportunity to direct questions to a person
described as the village leader. Eager to have this opportunity, a social worker from Boston
24
asked earnestly: “Have you had any cases of human trafficking here?” Through a translator
provided by the Mirror Art Foundation, the Akha village leader told us he had never heard of
the term “human trafficking,” and after some clarification of the terminology, he told the group
that this was not a key problem in the village. Disregarding his response, other reality tourists
persisted with similar lines of questioning: “What about migration? Do people from this village
leave to work?” The village leader once again said that this wasn’t their primary problem.
As the discussion circle disbanded and we headed to a meal that had been prepared for
us (described by tour guides as a “typical” Akha dinner…..), tour participants huddled together
and agreed that the village leader must have been lying. They easily dismissed the village
leader’s claim that in lieu of human trafficking, the more pressing issues of concern were
securing Thai citizenship for ethnic hill-tribe populations and the aggressive infringement of
land by corporations and the Thai government.56 While they appreciated the Akha village’s
food, handicrafts, and costumes as an “authentic glimpse” into hill-tribe life, they quickly
dismissed as fabricated the village leader’s claim that his village was not particularly vulnerable
to human trafficking. Just as Vrasti found in her study of volunteer tourism, the cultural
authenticity of the tourist experience and the validity of insider claims were called into question
only when they violated tourists’ preexisting notions of social realities.57 Significantly, the
tourists ignored the most “authentic” *117 voice they had heard so far—that of the Akha
village leader himself—because it did not conform to the understandings of human trafficking
that they already harbored, accounts that had been confirmed for them by the Mirror Art
Foundation’s “experts.”
Selling Sex and Trafficking: Conflations and Contestations
In contrast to the Akha village leader who claimed that human trafficking was not as
relevant as were concerns about citizenship and land rights—issues that were never otherwise
addressed during the tour—the reality tour’s insistence on the pernicious and pervasive nature
of human trafficking was explicitly asserted during our visit to the Labor Rights Promotion
Network in Bangkok, an organization that focuses on the labor rights of migrant workers in the
Thai fishing industry. Founded in 2004, LRPN was one of the earliest advocates and service
providers for victims of labor trafficking in deep-sea fishing and the shrimp-peeling
industries.58 Alongside the growth of global anti-trafficking campaigns, LRPN has received a
significant amount of international attention for
*118 addressing the problems of severe labor exploitation in the Thai fishing industry.
LRPN has also received a steady stream of funding to pursue research, advocacy, and direct
interventions in human trafficking.
During our visit to the organization, we huddled around a large table in the
organization’s meeting room while LRPN’s director of human trafficking programs described the
basic parameters of three recent trafficking cases that they had worked on: a labor trafficking
case, a case of trafficking for domestic servitude, and a case of sex trafficking. When describing
the sex-trafficking case, LRPN pulled up photographs of a raid that they had conducted in
collaboration with the Thai Department of Special Investigations, one of the government antitrafficking agencies.
The majority of photographs focused on the special team that had been assembled to
deal with the case: a large group of first responders including cameramen, note takers, social
workers, and police agents converging on a room where several sex workers lived. One grainy
25
photo that briefly flashed on the screen depicted eight women sitting in a simple living room
adorned with only heavily worn furniture. The presenter explained that the squalid living
conditions in this home represented a clear indication of human trafficking. Aside from the brief
and occluded glimpse into what appeared to be merely a room full of Asian women, the
presenter never indicated to us why this case was considered a case of trafficking under current
Thai law.59
Puzzled by the still-unspecified particulars of the alleged sex-trafficking case, we queried
the LRPN representative further, hoping to get a better sense of how the organization identified
trafficking cases and how they distinguished consensual from coerced forms of sexual labor.
Frustrated by our persistent questioning, one reality tour participant shook her head grimly and
whispered to her neighbor: “Why don’t they believe that it’s trafficking? Did you see the
conditions they were living in?” Like the other tour participants, she was already schooled in
the cinematic language of what the medical anthropologist Carole Vance has termed
“melomentary,” a cinematic genre in which “the horror of sex is amplified by the horror of
poverty.” In melomentaries, Vance notes, the camera visually attributes “residential crowding,
lack of clean water, TB, poor hygiene, disease, and living on the street specifically to brothels,
prostitution, and sex trafficking, rather than to the more general and widespread living
conditions of impoverished people.”60 Fluent in the cinematic languages of melomentary that
Vance describes, the tour participants required no proof of human trafficking beyond the
photos of the dimly lit and crowded living conditions in a brothel located in one of the poorer
sections.
In fact, we were soon to discover that the actual case turned out to be significantly
more complicated than initially presented. When we interviewed the LRPN presenter on our
own following the larger group meeting, we learned that the case concerned a group of migrant
Laotian sex workers, many of whom, LRPN admitted, were working willingly.
Given that they were undocumented, the police raid that was done in the name of
“combating human trafficking” left the majority of workers facing deportation. Meanwhile,
those workers who were under the age of eighteen were automatically classified as “victims of
trafficking,” because as minors, they legally did not have the right to choose to be sex workers.
This latter group was taken to government shelters, where they would be held (with or without
their consent, it was not clear) until the legal proceedings against their brothel owners were
completed.
Through our own supplementary research with local sex worker organizations and
activists, we would also later learn that many sex workers find such protectionist interventions
to be even worse than jail or deportation because the “sentences” are indefinite, and because
once they are deemed to be “victims of trafficking,” apprehended sex workers are subject to a
number of gender-specific forms of discipline and control. The Empower Foundation has
identified a number of common anti-trafficking practices which are justified by the state
in the name of providing protection but are often experienced by sex workers as intrusive and
discriminatory, including compulsory medical testing.61
26
______________________________________________________________________________
Chuang J. (2010). “Rescuing Trafficking from Ideological Capture: Prostitution Reform and
Anti- trafficking Law and Policy” 158 (6) University of Pennsylvania Law Review, pp. 16551728. Excerpts from 1657, 1701-1703
______________________________________________________________________________
U.S. law and policy have fueled controversy over anti-trafficking strategies, both at home and
abroad. In 2000, the United States led negotiations over a new international law on trafficking,
the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially
Women and Children (the U.N. Trafficking Protocol). At the same time, the United States
enacted a comprehensive domestic law on trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Both instruments define trafficking as the movement or recruitment of men, women, or
children, using force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary
servitude or slavery in one or more of a wide variety of sectors (for example, agriculture,
construction, or commercial a concerted effort to move away from traditional perspectives that
narrowly defined trafficking as the movement or recruitment of women or girls into the sex
sector and toward a broader under- standing of the problem as also involving the exploitation
of women, men, and children in non-sex sectors.
Although trafficking into non-sex sectors arguably accounts for the larger proportion of
trafficking activity, anti-trafficking laws and policies — both within the United States and
abroad —have nonetheless remained focused on sex-sector trafficking and prostitution. This
focus reflects the potent influence of prostitution-reform debates on the anti-trafficking
movement. Those debates have embroiled anti- trafficking advocates and policymakers in a
struggle over whether prostitution is inherently coercive, and therefore a form of trafficking, or
whether the trafficking label should be applied only to instances of forced prostitution. The
Bush Administration adopted the former position, marking the increasing influence of the “neoabolitionists”- an unlikely alliance of feminists, conservatives, and evangelical Christians who
have used the anti-trafficking movement to pursue abolition of prostitution around the globe.
…Through two discursive moves, this narrative redefines the putative victim population
as linked to the sex sector—first, by focusing attention on sex-sector trafficking to the exclusion
of non-sex-sector trafficking, and second, by conflating trafficking with prostitution. While in
some sense all narratives are reductive, these particular discursive moves have set in motion a
set of negative (however unintended) consequences. The reductive trafficking narrative
oversimplifies the problem of trafficking from a complex human rights problem rooted in the
failure of migration and labor frameworks to respond to globalizing trends, to a moral problem
and crime of sexual violence against women and girls best addressed through an aggressive
criminal justice response. In so doing, the narrative circumscribes the range and content of antitrafficking interventions proffered, feeding states’ preference for aggressive criminal justice
responses. It overlooks, if not discounts, the need for better migration and labor frameworks or
socioeconomic policies to counter the negative effects of globalizing trends that drive people to
undertake risky migration projects in the first instance.
*1702 Thus construed, trafficking is no longer the product of the disparties of wealth
created by globalization, gendered labor markets, or in- adequate migration frameworks, but
rather the result of the sexual *1703 proclivities of deviant individuals. The logic of this
27
representation suggests that to resolve the problem of trafficking, women should be rescued or
deported back home, or prevented from traveling in the first place, and that governments
should pass and aggressively enforce laws to punish these deviant elements….
Capitalizing on the “recycled” “tropes” of “violated femininity, shattered innocence, and
the victimization of ‘women and children,” the neo-abolitionist campaign promotes, in
Bernstein’s terms, a “militarized humanitarianism and carceral feminism” in its pursuit of social
remedies. The neo-abolitionist approach thus feeds a border-protection and crime-control
agenda by framing trafficking as a humanitarian issue that the “privileged” can combat by
supporting efforts to rescue and restore victims and punish the depraved individuals who
perpetrate the abuse…Notwithstanding multiple reports of failed rescues—where surprisingly
high percentages of involuntarily “res- cued” women escaped the shelters in order to return to
the brothels— the “rescue and restore” model has been enthusiastically embraced by faithbased and anti-prostitution feminist organizations alike, and lauded and generously funded by
the U.S. government…
.…The source of the harm thus lies not in institutions of corporate capitalism and the
state but in “individual, deviant men: foreign brown men . . . or even more remarkably, African
American men living in the inner city,” against whom the full power of law enforcement and
criminal law must be brought to bear. Indeed, the “root cause” of much of the suffering in the
developing world is not “hunger, homelessness, lack of education or disease” but “the failure of
the criminal justice system to protect the poor from violence.”
It is in this sense that neo-abolitionist constructions of the problem of trafficking hinder
development of long-term strategies for combating trafficking. Assuming away agency on the
part of female migrants obviates critical examination of the ways in which women turn to
informal migration avenues and to the informal economy for work (including the sex sector).
This, in turn, results in a fundamental failure to understand how restrictions on female
migration, especially for semiskilled or un- skilled workers, actually make offers by third parties
to facilitate their clandestine migration all the more attractive, thus increasing vulnerability to
trafficking.
Regrettably, the savior mentality avoids nuance in its quest for salvation and leaves little
room for self- doubt. The fact that pursuing such raids brings in millions of dollars in federal
funding, that shelters have a financial incentive to stay full (to justify their funding), and that
governments rely on shelters as evidence of their efforts to combat trafficking (in response to
the threat of U.S. anti-trafficking sanctions), adds to the disincentives for critical selfassessment.
….. [D]emand for trafficked persons is not simply about satiating sexual appetites or
taking advantage of cheap migrant labor but deeply entwined with the trafficked person’s
identity as a migrant “other.” The vulnerability and lack of choice that result from their migrant
(and possibly foreign and undocumented) status foster the perception, if not the reality, that
they are more “flexible” and “cooperative” with respect to poorer working conditions and more
vulnerable to “molding” to the requirements of job. Moreover, their racial “otherness” makes it
easier to “dress up a relation of exploitation as one of paternalism/maternalism” toward the
impoverished “other.”
28
______________________________________________________________________________
UNODC. (25 Nov. 2009). Human Trafficking Fuels Violence Against Women. Available at:
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2009/November/human-trafficking-fuelsviolence-against-women.html
______________________________________________________________________________
As the world marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women,
UNODC is drawing attention to how human trafficking fuels violence against women.
In its Global Report on Trafficking in Persons UNODC revealed that two thirds of the identified
victims of trafficking were women.
In his message for the day, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed that whether the
crime against women is rape, domestic violence, genital mutilation or trafficking for sexual
exploitation, it is inexcusable and must be stopped.
Human trafficking is, indeed, one of the worst forms of violence against women and
girls. Traffickers may use violence to intimidate and subdue the victims. Once recruited, the
women usually find themselves in situations with severely curtailed freedoms. Many times they
suffer extreme physical and mental abuse, including through rape, imprisonment, forced
abortions and physical brutality at the hands of their so-called "owners". The victims become
isolated, losing ties with their former lives and families.
With a better understanding of why women in particular are vulnerable to trafficking
and how traffickers operate, and by providing the necessary legal and technical assistance to
ensure that effective countermeasures are in place, this crime can be stopped.
Violence against women does not only concern women. It concerns everyone, and the
work to combat it must be done by all. Women around the world are the linchpin keeping
families, communities and nations together. Eliminating gender discrimination and genderbased violence will enhance the dignity and human rights of women and girls and help prevent
their being trafficked.
Addressing human trafficking cuts across all fundamental issues. It is about human
rights, peace and security, development and family health. In the most basic sense, it is about
preserving the fabric of society. We all have a role to play, either in raising awareness, building
partnerships, providing information, protecting victims or bringing the criminals to justice.
29
______________________________________________________________________________
Wang, Di. 2020. “Jia, as in Guojia: building the Chinese Family into a Filial Nationalist Project”
5 (1) China Law & Society Review 1-32. Excerpts from pp. 2, 17-20
______________________________________________________________________________
*2 China is not the only state with an interest in controlling its population and regulating
reproduction. Yet Chinese family law and policy are a distinct example of how a strong state
uses the law to shape its population of billions of people, reallocate resources among urban and
rural families, and channel state repression through individual families. Indeed, one cannot
understand Chinese law and society without understanding the Chinese family as a state
project. To unpack this state-family project, this article asks how the patriarchal state
constructs and manages the filial nationalist population to secure its authoritarian rule.
Through the lens of emerging Chinese feminist and queer scholarship on families, this article
also questions how this state-family project [p.3] has affected people and families who are
intersectionally marginalized by gender, sexuality, class, the household registration [hukou 户口
] system, and so on.
*17 3.2 Filial Nationalism
The first strategy that the Chinese state employs to legitimate its rule is filial
nationalism, which Vanessa Fong (2004) defines as a kind of filial devotion to the state that
builds on people’s unconditional loyalty to their parents. As previously discussed, the state has
cultivated the one-child policy generation to change China’s economic fate (Greenhalgh 2010;
Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005). These young people see themselves as competitive in the
global economy, but they also see China as inferior to other, wealthier countries (Fong 2004). In
addition, they have increased access to uncensored information about China, which makes
them more likely to question the CCP’s accounts of historical events, from World War ii to the
student-led democratic movement in the 1980s (Li and Li 2017; Zhao 2001). This awareness of
critiques of China has made it more difficult for the state to imbue this generation with
national- ism. For instance, research has shown that education in Chinese schools about the
official history of the anti-Japanese war (1937–1945) has failed to develop nationalism in young
students (Qian, Xu, and Chen 2017). In addition, since 2012 young feminist activists in the onechild policy generation have used social media to raise questions about the state’s unfulfilled
promise of equality between men and women (Tan 2017; Wang and Liu 2020).
*18 As it becomes more difficult to unite the new generation with glorified versions of
the CCP’s history, the state strengthens people’s connections to, and dependence on, their
families, combining the moral code of filial piety with state nationalist propaganda. As Eklund
notes, in China, it is common to see propaganda billboards with slogans such as “Filial piety
runs through the veins of the Chinese people” (2018, 296). As Fong (2004) finds, members of
the one- child policy generation can maintain a strong sense of filial devotion to China by
resolving their conflicting views of Chinese political and economic problems through the idiom
of filial devotion. Instead of portraying China as admirable, these young people develop a
strong sense of protecting the nation, especially against criticism from abroad, and
responsibility for building the nation as a global power. Indeed, while young people are
encouraged to love the nation as they love their parents, their increasing dependence on their
families makes it much harder for them to break away from their parents’ control and the
30
nationalist state-family project. As Fong puts it, the powerful foundation of these young
people’s nationalism is “the belief that they could no more cease to be ‘people of China’ than
they could cease to be their parents’ children” (2004, 645).
Although direct evidence of how the state uses filial piety is limited, activist
observations of civil society provide meaningful insights into how filial piety and family
relationships trouble people’s consciousness of their rights and sense of independence. Chinese
feminist activists have articulated how families contribute to maintaining social stability. For
example, in 2015 Zhao Sile, a feminist activist and writer, wrote an op-ed in the Oriental Daily
News, a Hong Kong–based newspaper, observing that there are two tasks that Chinese families
carry out to preserve social stability.18 The first task is to nudge their offspring to get married
and have children so that they are structurally tied to the family. The second is to push them to
work in stable careers. As Zhao pointed out, they do not have the option to be “an NGO worker,
a journalist, a writer, an artist, and soon enough, being a lawyer will not be an option, either,” a
reference to the July 9 crackdown on lawyers in 2015 when more than 200 Chinese lawyers and
human rights activists were instigated by the state authorities (Fu 2018). The issues raised by
the Chinese feminist movement show that instead of only focusing on cisnormative people in
heterosexual relation- ships and with an urban hukou, more research should be done on how
filial *19 nationalism affects the marriage and career decisions of marginalized people, such as
lgbtq people, working-class people, and people with a rural hukou, as well as how Chinese
activists of all genders view filial piety vis-à-vis both their families and the state. In addition,
many questions have yet to be explored about how the two-child policy has influenced parental
investment in a new generation that is more likely to grow up with siblings and how this change
will affect intergenerational relations.
3.3 Relational Repression
The second strategy the state uses to legitimate its rule is relational repression, which
refers to the state’s mobilization of people’s strong and weak social relations to influence
behavior and maintain social stability (Deng 2017; Deng and O’Brien 2013). In their studies of
environmental protest (Deng and O’Brien 2013) and urban demolition (O’Brien and Deng 2015),
Deng Yanhua and Kevin O’Brien found that some people withdrew from collective action
because they were concerned that their participation in protests would cause family members
to lose their livelihood or subject their loved ones to other kinds of punishment. Local state
agents play on this fear by recruiting family members, close friends, and even superiors at work
or school into thought-work teams [sixiang gongzuo xiaozu 思想工作小组], which are designed
to deter individual protesters from resistance. In practice, these teams are more likely to gain
cooperation from family members who are directly subject to state influence, such as local
officers, public school teachers, and business owners with government partnerships. Similar
incidents have been documented among people who petition the state (Biddulph 2015, 105)
and religious protesters (Luo and Andreas 2016).
Local state agents also mobilize neighbors and the surrounding community against
dissidents, thereby using people’s fear of social ostracism to target entire families with
“thought work.” As Deng Yanhua (2017) found in her work on “demolition and relocation”
[chaiqian 拆迁], local state agents encourage all neighborhood residents to establish small
committees and employ shame, guilt trips, and other marginalizing, and sometimes violent,
strategies to harass recalcitrant homeowners, remove homeowners from their property, and
31
force them to obey state-approved chaiqian plans. In the name of respecting people’s selfdetermination about neighborhood development, the state forcibly implements its
urbanization policy by relying on the neighborhood’s majority of people to police the minority
and make their families vulnerable to neighbors’ shaming and attacks. This is a sophisticated
social-control strategy that uses the weak social ties on which people’s well-being depends not
only to hide the state from view in repressing popular protests but also to hijack democratic
ideas such as community self-determination.
*20 With the advent of a national LGBTQ movement and the increased visibility of
LGBTQ people, the state’s practice of relational repression has started to incorporate
homophobic tactics. Since 2015, local state agents have made it a frequent practice to “out”
LGBTQ activists to their parents, on the assumption that doing so would neutralize their activist
children.19 Unsurprisingly, such strategies “successfully” serve the state’s interests. In China,
LGBTQ people cite their families as a top concern. It is not unusual for prominent Chinese
LGBTQ activists to choose not to come out to their families, to use pseudonyms, and to rely on
China’s censorship of LGBTQ rights issues to hide their activism from their families. Thus, after
Chinese state agents learned that they could disrupt individuals’ family ties by “outing” them,
they began to deploy this tac- tic to preserve “social stability.” For instance, on August 18, 2015,
the first day of a new school year, Qiu Bai’s parents found out that their daughter was a lesbian
after receiving a phone call from her university’s political ideology counselor. A college student
activist, Qiu Bai had sued the Chinese Ministry of Education, challenging its inaction on
homophobic school textbooks. According to Qiu, the university threatened to “out” her to her
parents if she did not drop the case, and it finally made good on its threat when she refused to
relent. Other incidents like this one suggest the need for systemic research on LGBTQ people’s
unique vulnerability to the state-family project and the range of state tac- tics that target
LGBTQ activists. Additionally, not all Chinese parents are homophobic, transphobic, or opposed
to social movements. Future research should examine how parents and other family members
refuse to pass down state messages as well as how parent-led alliance movements leverage
their parental authority over their children’s reproductive decisions and social responsibility to
resist state repression.
32