Sovereign Power, Government and Global Liberalism’s Crisis

Abstract: For some time now a leading cause of debate among IR scholars has been the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO) and its assumed crisis. This article pierces this debate from a critical perspective asserting that different conceptions and analytics of power allow diverse questions on and diagnoses of liberalism in the global realm. With this objective, it confronts Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the Foucauldian notion of liberalism. This is done by identifying the conception of power that underlies each notion of liberalism, assuming the former as performative. This way, it first defines two different conceptions of power: sovereign and governmental. Second, it links Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the sovereign conception of power and points out the political and analytical effects of this relation, mainly, the hierarchical character of LIO and the consequent desire for a West-led world. Third, it develops Foucault’s conception of liberalism linked to governmental power and establishes some of its political and analytical effects: the importance of a heterarchical notion of power focused on the dimension of subject and subjectivity for the analysis of the present, and the political need to reflect on our practices of freedom.

Practices of freedom and the disruption of binary genders: Thinking with trans

This article, inspired by a reading of O’Shea’s piece in this journal in 2018 which problematized the production of ‘normal’ identities, considers the ‘practices of freedom’ performed by non-binary trans people and their capacity to embody resistance against binary heteronormative gender intelligibility. We want to think with trans in order to challenge gender binaries and argue that their practices of freedom not only transform themselves, but also others. We suggest that this could be understood as a form of Foucault’s ‘care of the self’, producing new ways of doing gender which are not reducible to ‘man’ or ‘woman’ but that produce new histories and subjectivities. Given the complicated ways in which non-binary trans people engage in care of the self, we propose that it is possible to understand this as a form of organizing that embodies an ethics which disturbs and recodes the dominant way that gender is organized. They prefigure an idea and practice of trans organizing, attempting to move beyond dualisms, opening new possibilities for liveable lives.

Theoretical Riffs on the Blues

After disambiguating the word, the author explores the blues primarily not as a genre of music but as a sensibility or orientation toward the world. In doing so, he is taking seriously suggestions made by a host of writers, most notably, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and Cornel West. As such, the focus is on the blues as an extended family of somatic practices bearing upon expression (or articulation). At the center of these practices, there is in the blues (to modify Foucault’s words) always the patient yet exuberant work of giving articulate form to our impatience for human freedom. But here the distinction between practices of emancipation, by which a people throws off their political domination, and practices of freedom, by which they tirelessly work to make their freed self truly their own, is crucial. In this, the author is guided by an insight provided by Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (1987: 95). As “an art of ambiguity”, the blues turns out to be also an art of ambivalence: the task of claiming ownership of one’s freed self is one demanding, not only learning to live with irreducible ambiguity but also working toward “an achievement of ambivalence”.

Queer Presence in/and Hindu Nationalism

This chapter describes Hindu nationalist examples of national and transnational strategies of social inclusion and exclusion that mobilize gender and sexuality, including strategies that valorize some queer categories and de-valorize others, while also targeting the Hindu nation’s Others (such as Muslims) through complex social operations that draw upon, in part, colonial queerphobic legacies. This chapter contributes to the study of queer sexualities in postcolonial nationalisms through focusing on Hindu nationalism, discussing four social operations that organize the present: xenophobic queerphobia; queerphobic xenophobia, queerphilic idealization, and selective queer national-normativization. Through this work, Bacchetta seeks to complicate the current binary in which queer acceptance is already imagined as always a good thing and is systematically associated with the left, while queer repression is assigned to the right, toward creating and converging in struggles that enrich and support practices of freedom for all.

Movements of Freedom

Unlike the linear, regimented choreography associated with the cancan in the twentieth century, the early cancan (1821–1848) was defined by improvisation within the structure of the quadrille. This chapter examines primary sources on improvisation in the early cancan in the light of Michel de Certeau’s (1984) theory of ‘tactics’ and Danielle Goldman’s (2010) application of Michel Foucault’s (1997) notion of ‘practices of freedom’ to dance improvisation. The chapter argues that the cancan dancers’ improvisations drew on popular performance repertoires that embodied liberty and opposition to authority, grafting them into the contredanse/quadrille’s performance of French national identity. Those who were disenfranchised by the postrevolutionary monarchies played with alternative embodiments of liberty through these improvisations, creating a weapon of subtle resistance that the authorities could do little to suppress.