Why Everyone Is a Little Bit Queer
Queer, before it was associated with the LGBT community, meant simply: strange, peculiar, unusual, out of the ordinary. Implicit in this meaning is the fact that most people, in most…
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Identity Politics
36 posts
Labels: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly
Few things are as multifaceted or complex as personal identity. Yet, numerous social media posts and newspaper articles seem to suggest that we can somehow capture our unique individuality in…
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Queer: A New Narrative
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.—Ludwig Wittgenstein When early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote the above quotation, he was cautioning readers that…
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Julie Burchill’s “Welcome to the Woke Trials”: A Review of a Rant
Welcome to the Woke Trials: How Identity Killed Progressive Politics had a difficult birth. Hachette Book Group had originally agreed to publish it, but dropped the deal after its author,…
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The Persecutor Complex
The last thing the world needs now is to hear from another tall person. I know, I’m late to the game. But I’m willing to do the work, so here…
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The New Symbolic World Order
Public gestures and symbols have always been important to our shared narratives about nation and citizenship. Controversies over the use of particular symbols often herald or accompany a reordering of…
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Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand by Me?, by Christine Louis Dit-Sully
Can humanity transcend racial divisions? It might seem like a quixotic venture, given how pervasive race-related thinking still is in society. Not a day goes by without a race-related controversy…
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The Free Speech Crisis Runs Deeper Than You Think
The question of whether freedom of speech is under threat has been a point of debate for several years now. Some have argued that the notion of a free speech…
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The Rise of OnlyFans: A Sign of Economic Austerity
OnlyFans performer Ariel Anderssen has recently written about the ways in which she is empowered as an adult performer who is an active participant in the sex economy by choice.…
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The Limits of Lived Experience
The phrase lived experience seems to be part of the new normal of modern identity politics. Activists appeal to lived experiences to make their case against perceived social exclusion and…
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Wokeness Not Only Divides, It Distracts
The dictum stay woke first came into vogue when it was used by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, as an instruction to people of colour to wake up…
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We Can’t Just Oppose Racism: We Must Transcend Race
What does it mean for a racially designated person to no longer accept that designation? I didn’t fully realise the significance of being coded as black until I was thirteen.…
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It’s Not Socialism, It’s Clientelism
Socialism has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the US over the past few years, with the rise of populist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who proudly embrace…
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Is There A New Third Way?
When Senator Bernie Sanders recently dropped out of the 2020 presidential race, many wondered how, despite his initial surge in the polls, he was defeated by Joe Biden, a gaffe-prone…
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The Left is Having an Identity Crisis
The Left is in crisis. We no longer present a cohesive movement, and we no longer form coherent political parties. We are a fractured and ill-defined mess, our goals are…
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How the Collectivist Right Won the Battle of Ideas
Left-wing critics of Trump and of the worldwide resurgence of the populist right have been throwing the word fascist around liberally in recent years. But many people have missed the…
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Francis Fukuyama’s “Identity”: A Book Review
Francis Fukuyama is one of those authors who are often invoked and far less frequently read. This has to do, at least in part, with the controversy surrounding his first…
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Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma: Identity Politics and Feminism
Although the ideology of identity politics remains hegemonic in the academy and in many social institutions, a growing—and arguably necessary—body of critique has been emerging. These critiques have emanated both…
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