Counterpublics and Intersectional Radical Resistance: Agitation as Transformation of the Dominant Discourse

Abstract

This article examines the limitations of rights-based strategies and social movements for advancing the interests of marginalized and intersectionally-subjected populations in the US, and argues that counterpublics offer a viable alternative for populations designated as outsiders to cultivate their power, identities and discourses. While counterpublics are expected to comply with norms of behavior and discourse when attempting to persuade the public, they might find greater utility in rejecting the dominant discourse and decorum in favor of agitation. By privileging their own discourse and decentering the center, the counterpublics retain their power in their interactions with the public and can raise the saliency of their issues as exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement. In the current context of abnormal justice, the conditions are ripe for counterpublics to unite in an intersectional resistance in pursuit of transformative change as demonstrated by the protests at Standing Rock.

Notes

¹ New Political Science, Call for Papers.

² Black feminist thought has long advocated for the recognition of Black women’s intersectional identities. See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000); Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York, NY: The New Press, 1995), pp. 231–240; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:1 (1989), pp. 139–167; Ange-Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5:1 (2007), pp. 63–79. As Crenshaw demonstrated in her aforementioned seminal article on intersectionality, the courts have been unwilling or unable to recognize the intersectional identities of Black women thereby limiting their abilities to seek legal recourse for employment discrimination. As such, it is imperative to identify and validate individuals’ intersectional identities in order to understand and expose how they facilitate the ongoing subjection of some but not others. This recognition of the relationships among power and intersectional identities is essential to craft substantive remedies and facilitate transformative change, and consistent with Dean Spade’s work I prefer the term subjection to oppression to get at the “diverse, multifaceted and decentralized” nature of power, Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (New York, NY: South End Press, 2011) p. 27. To that end, throughout this article I utilize the term intersectionally-subjected to acknowledge how many intersectionally-identified populations, to include but not limited to Black women, are made vulnerable to forces of governmentality and targeted for social control on the basis of these identities, Courtenay W. Daum, “The War on Solicitation and Intersectional Subjection: Quality-of-Life Policing as a Tool to Control Transgender Populations,” New Political Science 37: 4 (2015), pp. 562–581.

³ President Trump stated that the events in Charlottesville, VA were the result of “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” and later reaffirmed his belief that “there is blame on both sides,” Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames ‘Both Sides,’” The New York Times. (August 15, 2017), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html?_r=0; Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Brian M. Rosenthal, “Man Charged After White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Ends in Deadly Violence,” The New York Times. (August 12, 2017), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-protest-white-nationalist.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article.

⁴ Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990), pp. 56–80; 67; Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14:1 (2002), pp. 49–90; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2005).

⁵ Nancy Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” Critical Inquiry 34:3 (2008), pp. 393–422, 396.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 119.

⁸ Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Audre Lorde (ed.), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), pp. 110–114.

⁹ Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 122.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Stuart Scheingold, The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy and Political Change, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

¹² Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.”

¹³ Ibid; Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics”; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.

¹⁴ Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” p. 396.

¹⁵ Charles Epp, The Rights Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

¹⁶ Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope, 2nd ed., (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

¹⁷ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, NY: The New Press, 2012); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2016).

¹⁸ Derrick Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980), pp. 518–533.

¹⁹ Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. (June, 2014), available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/; Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2004); Martin Gilens, “Race and Poverty in America: Public Misperceptions and the American News Media,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 60: 4 (1996), pp. 515–541.

²⁰ Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, “Beyond Bratton,” in Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (eds.), Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (New York, NY: Verso, 2016), pp. 174–175.

²¹ Goldie Taylor, “More Than 20 U.S. Cities Are Currently Under a DOJ Consent Decree, But Do They Really Work?” Blue Nation Review. (May 27, 2015), available online at: https://archives.bluenationreview.com/more-than-20-u-s-cities-are-currently-under-a-doj-consent-decree-but-do-they-really-work/.

²² United States v. City of Ferguson, United States District Court Eastern District of Missouri Eastern Division. NO. 4:16-cv-000180-CDP. (Filed March 17, 2016), available online at: https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/833431/download, p. 1.

²³ Ibid., 1.

²⁴ Ibid., 53.

²⁵ Ibid., 30.

²⁶ Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014).

²⁷ Doug Henwood, “The Underestimated Contributions of Liberals to Mass Incarceration” AAS21: A Twenty-first Century Archive African-American Studies, (2014), available online at: https://aas.princeton.edu/blog/publication/behind-the-news-with-doug-henwood/.

²⁸ Gilmore and Gilmore, “Beyond Bratton,” p. 198.

²⁹ Ibid., 175.

³⁰ Black Lives Matter, “About,” Blacklivesmatter.com, (2017), available at: https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Thank you to the editors of New Political Science and the anonymous reviewer who offered valuable substantive feedback on this section of the article.

³³ Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” p. 67.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ See, Lincoln Dahlberg, “The Habermasian Public Sphere: Taking Difference Seriously?” Theory and Society 34: 2 (2005), pp. 111–136; Alexander Livingston, “Avoiding Deliberative Democracy? Micropolitics, Manipulation, and the Public Sphere,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45: 3 (2012), pp. 269–294.

³⁷ Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, p. 105.

³⁸ Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” p. 86.

³⁹ Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” p. 396.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 408.

⁴¹ See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”

⁴² Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” p. 409.

⁴³ Ibid., 411.

⁴⁴ Dakota Access LLC and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Environmental Assessment: Dakota Access Pipeline Project, Crossings of Flowage Easements and Federal Lands,” (Omaha District, North Dakota: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2016), available online at: http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16021coll7/id/2801, p. 2.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 3.

⁴⁶ Standing Rock, “March.” Standingrock.net, (2017), available online at: https://standwithstandingrock.net/march/.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Fraser “Abnormal Justice,” p. 422.

⁴⁹ Black Lives Matter, “Solidarity with Standing Rock.” Blacklivesmatter.com, (2017), available online at: http://blacklivesmatter.com/solidarity-with-standing-rock/.

⁵⁰ Glenn Magpantay, “Dispatch from Standing Rock: Queer and Trans Asian Americans’ Reflections” The Huffington Post. (February 2, 2017), available online at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-magpantay/dispatch-from-standing-ro_b_14575938.html. Interestingly, individuals traveling with this group to Standing Rock represented groups such as API Resistance and Asians for Black Lives that first formed in order to support Black Lives Matter and fight anti-Black racism and White supremacy which serves as further evidence of individual counterpublics coalescing as an intersectional resistance, API Resistance, “API Resistance.” Facebook Page, (2017), available at: https://www.facebook.com/apiresistance/about/?xt=33.%7B%22logging_data%22%3A%7B%22page_id%22%3A%22,748,170,491,969,052%22%2C%22event_type%22%3A%22clicked_view_page_about%22%7D%7D).

⁵¹ API Resistance, “API Resistance.”

⁵² Fraser “Abnormal Justice,” p. 395.

⁵³ Ibid., 396.

⁵⁴ Clyde W. Barrow, “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science 30: 2 (June 2008), pp. 215–244.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 224, emphasis added.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 244.

⁵⁷ Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” p. 86.