Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Gender (Page 4 of 6)

How Elizabeth Warren Lost

March 5, 2020 /

elizabeth warren lost angelic photo

Elizabeth Warren 2020 began in 2015. A coalition of liberals and progressives lifted her up as the right person to lead an electoral coalition. Why? Her bona fides as a consumer advocate and legislative leader – and her broad appeal across the Democratic Party – suggested her as the champion of a movement to push Obama’s Democratic Party to the left without leaving the Obama coalition behind.

Her 2020 campaign aimed to do just that. But the terrain changed. It was no longer a unity between Obama and the myriad forces of the shattered electoral left. It was a surging electoral left – united by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign – and the Biden/Clinton/Obama ‘party establishment.’ Warren promised to combine the progressivism of Sanders with the practicality of a campaign that could mobilize Democratic voters and win over a bit of ‘Middle America.’

Or so the theory went. We know it didn’t work out that way, and I’ll discuss why. Here are two major factors I see contributing to her loss. And one factor some Elizabeth Warren defenders cite that I’ll argue wasn’t really much of a factor.

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looping effects making up people ian hacking

The Looping Effects of ‘Bisexual’

February 10, 2020 /

After the 2004 US election, pundits – and college students like myself – went looking for answers. How could Americans re-elect a buffoonish warmonger like George W. Bush? Over the course of a decade, this search guided me from pundit-generated pablum like ‘NASCAR Dad‘ to the philosophically compelling ‘looping effects of human kinds’, as Ian Hacking put it. Let’s trace that journey.

What struck me about the punditry is their attribution of an ordinary event – the re-election of a president – to hidden, mysterious forces. Who were these NASCAR Dads riding to Dubya’s rescue? As it happens, they’re no one new. Lifting up the hood reveals the same white, mostly male, non-college educated voters who elected Reagan in 1980 and Trump in 2016. They vote Republican in every election. ‘NASCAR Dad’ is only a seemingly fresh take on an old story, loaded this time with cultural references.

But I drew lessons from getting burned by bad punditry and bad political science. Through works like ‘Making Up People‘ and The Social Construction of What?, I found philosophers doing great work on classifications of people and how people react – the ‘looping effects’ of my title! And so, I’ll start there. What are ‘looping effects’, and how do they apply to the term ‘bisexual’? Does it mean people aren’t really bisexual, just as people aren’t really NASCAR Dads? Or are NASCAR Dads real after all? Is there some ‘authentic self’ prior to how we’re grouped?

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political currency various pieces of US political propaganda

Using Identity as Political Currency

January 20, 2020 /

There’s a certain line of thought out there in the political ether. The idea goes something like this. People use their identity to take political action, win offices, pass legislation, steer conversations, or direct movements. Or, to put it more simply, they use identity as political currency.

Now, when people say this, they often speak ominously or conspiratorially. By ‘people’ here, they have in mind members of marginalized groups. They think those sorts of people (i.e., others) use their identity as political currency. That’s something we should keep at the back of our minds, because people (and here I mean ‘white people, usually white men’) tend to overlook cases where members of their own group do things like this.

So…what is it to use identity as political currency? How’s it done? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or both/neither?

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Holdo Dameron Star Wars The Last Jedi

Holdo and Dameron: Neoliberal and Chauvinist

December 16, 2019 /

In case any readers are hermits, let me start with a reminder that The Rise of Skywalker hits theaters this week. The end of the Star Wars story, and so on. But I’m interested here in one of the plot lines of The Last Jedi. Vice Admiral Holdo and Poe Dameron went at it several times, from a minor skirmish to a mutiny. I think the conflict reveals deeper ones about gender and politics. It also shares a feature with the Killmonger character from the Black Panther film, namely it’s a Rorschach test! Whichever issues Holdo and Dameron reveal to you probably says as much about your views on gender and politics as the film itself says.

So here are some thoughts about it. Maybe it reveals my own views in some Rorschach-like manner. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

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booksmart good boys

Booksmart and Good Boys

October 14, 2019 /

In DJ Shadow’s 2016 Classic Nobody Speak, El-P from the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels starts off the song as follows:

Picture this
I’m a bag of dicks
Put me to your lips
I am sick
I will punch a baby bear in his shit

Two 2019 coming-of-age films feature this charming tune. First, we have Booksmart, which I wrote about a bit earlier as one of the best films of the year so far. And second, we have Good Boys. Good Boys is…something different. This might say something about gender, film, and childhood in the US.

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