The spiral of survival

ABSTRACT

This essay ruminates on the imperative of struggle against oppression as a condition for survival. While many circumstances encourage our resignation to oppressive power relations, there are revolutionary possibilities for human agency against injustice in interpersonal, social, institutional, and political domains of contemporary society.

KEYWORDS:

• survival
• resignation
• revolution
• dialectic
• standpoint

Notes

1 “Heavy Rains and Flooding,” Climate Central, last modified May 22, 2019, https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/extreme-weather-toolkits/heavy-rain-flooding; Yasemin Saplakoglu, “Carbon Dioxide Soars to Record-Breaking Levels not Seen in at Least 800,000 Years,” LiveScience, May 14, 2019, https://www.livescience.com/65469-highest-carbon-dioxide-levels.html; “Living Planet Report, 2018,” World Wildlife Federation, accessed March 9, 2020, https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018; “World Faces ‘Climate Apartheid’ Risk, 120 More Million in Poverty: UN Expert,” UN News, June 25, 2019, https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1041261.

2 See Nina Maria Lozano, Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019). Ignacio Torres, Jessica Hopper, and Juju Chang, “For Trans Women of Color Facing the Epidemic of Violence, Each Day is a Fight for Survival,” ABC News, November 20, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/US/trans-women-color-facing-epidemic-violence-day-fight/story?id=66015811; Amina Khan, “Getting Killed by Police is a Leading Cause of Death for Young Black Men in America,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-08-15/police-shootings-are-a-leading-cause-of-death-for-black-men; Julie Bosman, Kate Taylor, and Tim Arango, “A Common Trait Among Mass Killers: Hatred Toward Women,” New York Times, August 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/us/mass-shootings-misogyny-dayton.html; Nick Miroff, “Trump Administration Has Expelled 10,000 Migrants at the Border During Coronavirus Outbreak,” Washington Post, April 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trump-administration-has-expelled-10000-migrants-at-the-border-during-coronavirus-outbreak/2020/04/09/b177c534-7a7b-11ea-8cec-530b4044a458_story.html. However, see also https://blacklivesmatter.com/ (accessed May 21, 2020). This movement has emerged to respond at the intersection of these violations.

3 Michael Sainato, “‘Go Back to Work’: Outcry Over Deaths on Amazon's Warehouse Floor,” The Guardian, October 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths; Josh Dzieza, “A Seventh Amazon Employee Dies of COVID-19 as the Company Refuses To Say How Many Are Sick,” The Verge, May 14, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/14/21259474/amazon-warehouse-worker-death-indiana.

4 James Fallows, “The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance,” The Atlantic, March 20, 2018, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/iraq-war-anniversary-fifty-first-state/555986; “Costs of War,” Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, January 2020, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan.

5 Ed Pilkington, “As 100,000 Die, the Virus Lays bare America's Brutal Fault Lines—Race, Gender, Poverty, and Broken Politics,” The Guardian, May 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/28/us-coronavirus-death-toll-racial-disparity-inequality?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0xZLhG_aYgyl8MSFsOMKahQ6lUEJFvZM4u895unofxsaCS4I7KMmBwOUQ.

6 I am using this “we” throughout the essay to represent myself and imagined others in our field who need to take note of this forum and to be attentive and accountable to critical scholars, queer scholars, scholars of color, and all of those whose survival in the academy is most precarious. I do not mean to speak for those who are fighting marginalization.

7 See Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: the Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24; Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono, eds., Critical Rhetorics of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72; Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994); Thomas K. Nakayama, “Show/Down Time: ‘Race,’ Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11, no. 2 (1994): 162–79; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19–46; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291–309; Lisa A Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56; Marouf Hasian Jr. and Fernando Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,” Communication Theory 8, no. 3 (1998): 245–70. Raka Shome, “‘Global Motherhood’: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 5 (2011): 388–406; Kristiana L. Baez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 331–36; Ersula J. Ore, Lynching—Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019); Annie Hill and Karma R. Chávez, “Introduction: Inciting Communication Across Queer Migration Studies and Critical Trafficking Studies,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 300–4.

8 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, updated edition (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (New York: Pluto Press, 2017).

9 Jane E. Brody, “The Crisis in Youth Suicide,” New York Times, December 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/well/mind/the-crisis-in-youth-suicide.html; Stephanie Doupnik, “I Treat Teens Who Attempted Suicide,” Vox.com, October 30, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/30/20936636/suicide-mental-health-suicidal-thoughts-teens.

10 A recent study by scholars at Washington State University argues, “Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder may be primarily responses to adversity; therefore, only treating the ‘psychic pain’ of these issues with drugs will not solve the underlying problem.” Sara Zaske, “New Approach to Some Mental Disorders,” Science Daily, May 26, 2020, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200526124034.htm.

11 Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

12 Dana L. Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetorics of Therapy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).

13 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020); Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988). I fully acknowledge the ethical turn toward theorizing agency in both Foucault's and Butler's thinking, and Butler's turn to public politics in her life and her theorization of movements in Performative Theory of Assembly and Force of Nonviolence. I look forward to future opportunities for conversation on these works.

14 I have made this argument frequently and at length elsewhere and ask readers to seek out those contributions rather than attempt more here. See Dana L. Cloud, “The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 4 (2006): 329–54.

15 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).

16 Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1984).

17 Ore, Lynching; Hill and Chávez, “Introduction”; Shome, “Global Motherhood.”

18 Jesus Cisneros and Julia Guttierez, “‘What Does It Mean to Be Undocuqueer?’ Exploring (il)Legibility Within the Intersection of Gender, Sexuality, and Immigration Status,” QED: A Journal in Queer Worldmaking 5, no. 1 (2018): 84–102.

19 Dana L. Cloud, “‘Civility’ as a Threat to Academic Freedom,” First Amendment Studies 49, no. 1 (2015): 13–17; Dana Cloud, “Responding to Right-Wing Attacks,” InsideHigherEd, November 7, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/11/07/tips-help-academics-respond-right-wing-attacks-essay; Dana Cloud, “From Austerity to Attacks on Scholars,” InsideHigherEd, May 3, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/03/neoliberal-academy-age-trump.

20 Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 237.

21 Noam Scheiber, “In a Strong Economy, Why Are So Many Workers on Strike?,” The New York Times, October 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/business/economy/workers-strike-economy.html.

22 See Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee Collective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).

23 Dana L. Cloud, “The Possibility of a Liberating Narrative: Woman on the Edge of Time as Radical, Mythical, Moral Argument,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Gender, eds. Linda A. M. Perry, Lynn H. Turner, and Helen M. Sterk (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 5–16.

24 Marge Piercey, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 150.

25 Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007).