Queer(y)ing Hannah Arendt, or what’s Hannah Arendt got to do with intersectionality?

Abstract

This article takes an unlikely approach to thinking about intersectionality theory. Exploring key concepts from the writings of Hannah Arendt, such as plurality, conscious pariah, and statelessness, alongside her embodied interrogation of anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question, it suggests a way to transgress the ordinary boundaries of the concepts of queer, international, and feminist and, conversely, to unbound the ordinary ways Arendt’s theories have been interpreted as less relevant, if not antithetical to, feminist, intersectional, and queer theories and politics.

Keywords:

• Arendt
• intersectionality
• plurality
• queer theory
• transnational politics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of New Political Science, and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions for revising the essay. They helped tremendously in bringing greater clarity to my ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 8.

² Karen Barad, “Intra-actions” (Interview of Karen Barad by Adam Kleinmann)” Mousse 34 (June, 2012), p. 81.

³ Special Collections and Archives, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Papers, Box 5.

⁴ Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 11.

⁵ Lena Gunnarsson, “Why We Keep Separating the ‘Inseparable’: Dialecticizing Intersectionality,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, March 23, 2015, DOI:10.1177/1350506815577114.

⁶ Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millenials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

⁷ This is not an argument against the analytical deployment of specific categories of social difference, but one calling for a “differentiation between categories of positionality and social identities” (Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13:3 (2006), p. 205). In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, sustained analysis of the processes and systems that produce asymmetrical differences of social positionality and division, which we label with terms such as gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, et cetera, remains essential to the project of radical critique and transformative politics. Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Kathleen B. Jones, “Out of Epistemology: Feminist Theory in the 1980s and Beyond,” in Jones and Jónasdóttir (eds), The Political Interests of Gender Revisited: Redoing Theory and Research with a Feminist Face (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 17–57. See also Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43:6 (1991), pp. 1241–1299, and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004).

⁸ Cricket Keating identified “coalitional consciousness-building” as one strategy useful for broadening the politics of “being among” beyond the boundaries of the often quite small and relatively homogeneous “circles of belonging that we are born into and to which we are trained to direct our efforts and concerns.” Cricket Keating, “Building Coalitional Consciousness,” NWSA Journal 17:2 (2005) p. 86. I argue HALPP’s strategy was aimed at producing such a broadened politics of belonging.

⁹ Letitia Sabsay, “Queering the Politics of Global Sexual Rights?” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 13:1 (2013), p. 81.

¹⁰ Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millenials, p. 44.

¹¹ The quotation marks around these terms are meant to signal these as alterable structural formations or relational processes, the experience of which, at the level of everyday living, may contain elements of both. Or, as Hancock puts it, “there are no longer any pure victims” (Ibid., 54). The aim is to “avoid attributing fixed identity groupings to the dynamic processes of positionality and location … and the contested and shifting political construction of categorical boundaries.” Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13:3 (2006), p. 200.

¹² Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” p. 198.

¹³ Nancy Fraser, “Hannah Arendt in the 21st Century,” Contemporary Political Theory 3:3 (2004), p. 254.

¹⁴ See the Oxford Bibliographic entry on Feminist International Relations (IR): available online at: <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0044.xml>.

¹⁵ Rita Kaur Dhamoon, “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality,” Political Research Quarterly 64:1 (2011), p. 231.

¹⁶ Ibid., 234, 235.

¹⁷ Cynthia Weber, “Why is There No Queer International Theory?” European Journal of International Relations 21:1 (2015), p. 27.

¹⁸ Ibid., 28, quoting David Eng with Judith [Jack] Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23:3–4 (2005), p. 2.

¹⁹ Fraser, “Hannah Arendt in the 21st Century,” p. 255. See also Joan Cocks, On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), and Jackie Stevens, States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

²⁰ Ange-Marie Hancock makes use of Arendt’s methodology of selbstdenken (“thinking for oneself”) in her articulation of a process she calls “preparing for solidarity” in ways that “acknowledge the reality of intersectionality.” Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millenials, p. 85. As have other scholars, Hancock also points out the limits of Arendt’s own capacity for “representative thinking” or “letting the imagination go visiting.” Arendt’s almost total inattention to the “history of civil rights struggles” made it “nearly impossible” for her to demonstrate the empathy and trustworthiness necessary for the development of “deep political solidarity” (p. 81). See also Kathryn Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014). In this essay, I explore whether Arendt’s thinking on the concept of plurality can extend in the direction of what Hancock calls “paradigm intersectionality” (p. 50).

²¹ Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, Ed. Lilliane Weissberg, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

²² Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 81.

²³ Nira Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” Patterns of Prejudice 40:3 (2006), pp. 197–214.

²⁴ Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, pp. 88–89, 103.

²⁵ Hannah Arendt, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936–1968, edited and with introduction by Lotte Kohler (New York: Harcourt, 1996), p. 10, emphasis added.

²⁶ As both Hancock and Gines have noted, Arendt herself was unable to extend the logic of her own argument to the case of African Americans struggling for civil rights in the 1950s.

²⁷ Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Gunter Gaus,” in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding 1930–54 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), p. 12.

²⁸ Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 248.

²⁹ Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millenials, p. 45. See also Edwina Barvosa’s discussion of the role of ambivalence and ambiguity in comprehending intersectional positionality in Wealth of Selves: Multiple Identities Mestiza Consciousness and the Subject of Politics (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008). I am grateful for the comments of the editors, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for helping me formulate this linkage.

³⁰ Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in Ron H. Feldman (ed.), The Jew as Pariah (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 76.

³¹ Shin Chiba, “Arendt on Love and the Political: Love, Friendship, and Citizenship,” The Review of Politics 57:3 (1995), pp. 506, 509.

³² Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millenials, p. 65.

³³ “On the Emancipation of Women,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, p. 66.

³⁴ Correspondence File, 1938–1976, General, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

³⁵ Correspondence File, 1938–1976, Universities and Colleges, 1947–1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

³⁶ Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), pp. 196, 207–208.

³⁷ Ibid., 197, 208. For a critical interpretation of Arendt’s privileging the condemnation of antimiscegenation laws over segregation in the schools, see Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, pp. 30–42.

³⁸ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 7.

³⁹ Morris Kaplan, “Refiguring the Jewish Question: Arendt, Proust, and the Politics of Sexuality,” in Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 106, 105.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 129.

⁴¹ Ibid., 131.

⁴² For further discussion of this complexity see Kathleen B. Jones, Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt (San Diego, CA: Thinking Women Books, 2013).

⁴³ Mary Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 129.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 98.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 94.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 100.

⁴⁸ Dietz, Turning Operations, p. 131.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Bonnie Honig, “Toward and Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 135–166.

⁵¹ Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials, p. 46. See also Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 13.

⁵² Nira Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” pp. 213, 211.

⁵³ Rosi Braidotti argues against the notion of exile, as well as that of migrant, for being inappropriate, restoring “the notion of a ‘politics of location’ to the radical political function for which it was intended.” Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 21. For her, the homelessness of the exile cannot be generalized into some new ideal because it fails to pay enough careful attention to differences amongst and between groups, especially in the case of those who “have never had a home or a remembered home country.” Instead, she offers the image of “the nomad,” who “does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity” (pp. 21, 22). Nevertheless, Arendt takes the diasporic status of the conscious pariah, who may be an exile not only from the dominant society, but also from her own “origins,” as a figure of possibility for an alternative politics of belonging. Although by no means is Arendt an intersectional theorist, her concepts provide useful purchase on efforts to move past more static to more dynamic conceptualizations of “privilege and disadvantage, without ignoring the role of either historical patterns or humans’ ability to intervene in their own lives” (Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials, p. 44).

⁵⁴ I distinguish the conscious pariah’s “acceptance of exclusion” from Lee Edelman’s argument that “the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead … depend[s] on taking seriously the place of the death drive we’re called on to figure and insisting … that we do not intend a new politics” (Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 30–31, emphasis added). C. Heike Schotten has recently endorsed a modified version of Edelman’s rejection of futurist politics, arguing that “futurism is a distinctively modern phenomenon … For, whether liberal or conservative, Left or Right, every modern political theory is invested in the repetition and reproduction of the social order, cast as an aspirational ideal, to which the present is held hostage … [M]odern politics as such is defined by its investment in reproducing an order of sameness at the expense of the difference of now” (C. Heike Schotten, “Homonationalist Futurism: ‘Terrorism’ and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire,” New Political Science 37:1 (2015), p. 76, emphasis in the original). Edelman’s radical alternative, according to Schotten, is “to live life as an insistent presentism that will do nothing else afterward but die …” (p. 85). From this perspective, queer then “designates … anyone who sacrifices the future for the sake of the present” (p. 83). Yet, if “homonationalist” discourses operate to mark certain groups as “perverse” or “queer” through an identification of all Arabs and Muslims in the political imaginary with the “terrorist” as “a figure of monstrosity, excess, savagery, and perversion” (p. 79; cf. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)), two points are worth noting. First, “actual” (as opposed to “imagined”) terrorists sacrifice the present for an imagined future; they can hardly be said to be practicing a politics of presentism. Second, asserting that a “broad array of misfits and perverts” can become “emblematic of the death and destruction of the social order” (p. 83) begs the question of whether there is any ethical basis for determining the limits of plurality. In other words, if one group sets out to annihilate whole populations “either through genocidal policies or systematic neglect,” thereby arrogating to themselves the ability to “decide among whom they will inhabit the earth,” (Butler, Parting Ways, p. 174) have they not violated the principle of plurality itself? And, if so, what is the just response to such a situation?

⁵⁵ Butler, Parting Ways, p. 117.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 125, emphasis added.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 151.

⁵⁸ Ibid., cf. 125.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 125, emphasis added.

⁶⁰ Ibid. For a critique of Butler’s derivation of a democratic political principle from an ethical assertion about the “precariousness of life,” see Ella Myers, Worldy Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 75–82.

⁶¹ Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1968), p. 23, emphasis added.

⁶² Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Papers, Box 5, emphasis added.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Butler, Parting Ways, p. 117. For a very moving account of the process of building an intersectional approach to “queer internationalism,” which also cites Arendt’s influence in the author’s broadening political consciousness, see Sarah Shulman’s narrative of her work around the issue of the occupied territories in Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

⁶⁵ Special Collections and Archives, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Papers, Box 5.

⁶⁶ Special Collections and Archives, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Papers, Box 5.

⁶⁷ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Papers, Box 5.

⁶⁸ Gila Svirsky, “Local Coalitions, Global Partners: The Women’s Peace Movement in Israel and Beyond,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29:2 (2003), pp. 543–550.

⁶⁹ Butler, Parting Ways, p. 121.

⁷⁰ Arendt, The Jew As Pariah, p. 66.

⁷¹ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004 [1951]), p. 353.

⁷² Ibid., 351.

⁷³ Ibid., 370.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 369.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 372.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 371.

⁷⁷ Dhamoon, “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality,” p. 240.

⁷⁸ Despite her perceptiveness about the problem of racism, Arendt’s views on how to eliminate racism were subject to their own blind spots. See Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question; Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African-Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 247–262; and Judith Butler, “I Merely Belong to Them,” London Review of Books 29:9 (2007), pp. 26–28.

⁷⁹ Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in Jerome Kohn (ed.), The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 367.

⁸⁰ Hannah Arendt, “The Disenfranchised and the Disgraced,” in The Jewish Writings, p. 235.

⁸¹ “The Disenfranchised and the Disgraced,” in The Jewish Writings, p. 235; Butler, Parting Ways, pp. 116–117 on the “Jewishness” of Arendt’s perspective.

⁸² “The Disenfranchised and the Disgraced,” p. 352.

⁸³ Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” in The Jewish Writings, p. 396.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 383.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 613.

⁸⁷ Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 269.

⁸⁸ Lori Marso, “Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt: Judgments in Dark Times,” Political Theory 4:2 (2012) p. 174; Butler on Arendt’s rendering of judgment in the Eichmann trial, Parting Ways, pp. 151–180.

⁸⁹ Giorgio Agamben, “We Refugees,” Symposium 49:2 (1995), p. 114.

⁹⁰ See Stevens, States Without Nations.

⁹¹ Agamben, “We Refugees,” pp. 117–18.

⁹² Ibid., 118.

⁹³ Ibid.

⁹⁴ Ibid.; Butler, Parting Ways, p. 209.

⁹⁵ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), p. 40.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 164.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 191, 196.

⁹⁸ Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 375.

⁹⁹ Ibid., emphasis added.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 376, emphasis added.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 379, emphasis added.

¹⁰² Fraser, “Hannah Arendt in the 21st Century,” p. 259.

¹⁰³ Butler, Parting Ways, p. 174; Meyer, Worldy Ethics, pp. 113–122.

¹⁰⁴ Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 120.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid.,121.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 262.

¹⁰⁸ Cf. Cocks, On Sovereignty, pp. 135–140.