The Yogyakarta Principles for the application of human rights to sexual orientation and gender identity define gender identity as “each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech, and mannerisms.” This definition and its acknowledgment within human rights politics is a key step in the fight of trans people for legal protection. Our (...) aim is to analyze this definition both historically and systematically to find out how the Western liberal conception of rights fosters specific trans politics and limits the options for others. Specifically, we claim that political liberalism and the form of subjective rights that it brings about influence concepts of identity and political strategies. While we analyze the limits of the liberal framework, our aim is to think about how it is possible that even within this framework, non-normative bodies and queer identities can be acknowledged and supported through law. (shrink)

Identity politics is subject to similar critiques in contemporary public debate and political theory. A central topos of this critique is that identity politics is essentializing: it fixes subjects to their social position and resorts to a politics of particularity that leads to divisions in national citizenship and democratic discourse (the communitarian and liberal position) and to divisions within social movements (the critical position). Contrary to this one-sided critique, we propose a different interpretation with the concept of “constructivist identity politics.” (...) We show that political identities are not essentialistically given, but emerge from processes of social and political construction; that they are actively produced, learned, and practiced by political (sub)cultures and movements. In these processes of construction, political articulation and agency are produced, enabling subjects to critique relations of domination and discrimination. Following radical democratic theory, we argue that the particular political perspectives of identity politics thus enabled do not endanger democracy or solidarity in social movements, but contribute to their further democratization by actualizing the universal principles of democracy in particular disputes. While the construction processes of identity politics tend to essentialize and produce exclusions, critical reflection on such tendencies is also inherent to identity politics. This understanding also enables a critique of such identity politics that is not oriented towards the democratic values of equality and freedom and blocks critical self-reflection. After an overview of contemporary identity politics critique, we elaborate this constructivist understanding following debates in feminist and postcolonial theory since the 1980s. Building on this, we systematically develop the notion of constructivist identity politics by differentiating three aspects of it: subjectification, articulation, and representation. We refer to approaches by Foucault, Rancière, Laclau/Mouffe, and Hall and illustrate the respective aspects through examples of migrant self-organizations as well as gay culture and queer critique. (shrink)

In response to an impasse, articulated in the late 1980s, the cognitive capacities of ordinary people assumed central place in contemporary critical social theory. The participants’ perspective gained precedence over scientific standards branded as external. The notion of cognition, however, went unchallenged. This article continues the move away from external standards, and discusses two models of critique, which differ based on their underlying notions of cognition. The representational model builds on cognitive content, misrecognition and normativity; three features which are illustrated (...) with positions adopted by prominent exponents of critical social theory. An alternative understanding relies on action-oriented disclosure and the participants’ basic familiarity with the social world. On this reading, what clashes with unequal structures is skilful coping, rather than representations and normative standards. The action-oriented approach may overcome the dilemma of understanding both the impact and the possible transcendence of unequal structures, although it cannot ultimately replace representational critique. (shrink)

A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault’s ‘agentless position’ for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault’s writings, which allows space for ‘human agency’, including individuals’ pursuit of tactics, attempts at solving problems, reactions to unexpected events and their reflexive work on their own subjectivities. (...) The revised analytical framework, ‘dispositional analytics’, integrates the study of self-techniques with the analysis of dispositifs. Recognizing that Foucault’s work eschewed an adequate consideration of individuals’ capacity to affect the forces that bear upon them, the article discusses the sociopolitical conditions for self-formation. Finally, a case study of ‘voice-hearers’ who use self-techniques to reconstitute themselves in opposition to institutional psychiatry is reinterpreted through the framework of dispositional analysis. (shrink)

In dominant discourses, migrants are mostly perceived as either victims or villains but rarely as political subjects and democratic constituents. Challenging this view, the aim of the article is to rethink democracy with respect to migration struggles. I argue that movements of migration are not only consistent with democracy but also provide a decisive impetus for actualizing democratic principles in the context of debates about the crisis of representation and post-democracy. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar and (...) Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I develop a theory of radical democracy as practice, which, starting from the proposed notion of ‘democratic difference’, goes beyond the fixation on democratic regimes and focuses on contentious practices of enacting democratic principles. I articulate these theoretical concepts by analysing how refugees in Germany have managed to break out of a marginalized position and have challenged their denial of rights through a protest march. (shrink)

The article scrutinizes Foucault’s articulations of resistance, arguing against the entrenched understanding that resistance in Foucault is necessarily negative, or impossible. We concentrate on a specific period of his work, situated between the disciplinary phase and the beginning of the 1980s when Foucault began to develop the idea of the aesthetic of existence. We argue that in this period Foucault developed the notion of resistance as agentic, lived and possible, through three interrelated concepts. These are reverse discourse, counter-conduct and the (...) critical attitude, elaborated in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, the course Security, Territory, Population and the lecture ‘What is Critique?’. The link between these concepts is provided by the effect they produce, captured by Foucault’s understanding of desubjectivation. Our claim is that Foucault reorients his work towards studying subjectivity through articulating resistance as desubjectivation. The main claim of the article is that Foucault not only allows for the possibility of resistance, but that his attempts to calibrate what it may mean to resist led him to fine-tune his understanding of power. Foucault arrived at power as subjection through the gradual development of resistance as desubjectivation. (shrink)