Christopher Griffin

Sylvia Wynter seeks nothing less than a redescription of the human, an ecumenical self-representation that would overcome the violent exclusions of coloniality and overturn the reign of Man. Given that our present concept of representation sustains the universalising overrepresentation of Man, what transformations are required for this new image of the human to surface? What are the epistemological implications for radical aesthetics today? This article brings Wynter into dialogue with Jacques Derrida to address these questions through the examination of colonial narratives and counternarratives; namely, David Lloyd’s reading of the Kantian-Hegelian dialectic of consciousness, and Annalee Newitz’s speculative fiction Autonomous.

The idea that rights are possessions that are given and lost is so ubiquitous within the dominant discourse that its metaphoricity is forgotten. This amnesia naturalises possessive individualism, allowing rights practices to be shaped by the colonial episteme. Furthermore, the metaphor of possession turns rights into tools of oppression by producing zero-sum economies of rights that foster division through the perception that for a certain group to gain rights, another must lose some. An example of this invidious narrative is the claim made by anti-transgender activists that the rights of trans women ‘clash’ with the rights of cis women. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter, this article aims to intervene by examining the coloniality of the concept of rights that the anti-trans position presupposes, connecting this to the coloniality of the immutable sex-gender ontology that it defends. Motivating anti-trans feminism, I argue, are the epistemic and libidinal rewards of sacrificial relationality. Seeking a non-possessive concept of rights that could resist zero-sum politics and capture the simultaneity of struggles for liberation, I then turn to María Lugones and her critique of categorial purity, asking whether metaphors of enmeshed rights could unsettle the episteme of Man while shifting the terms of the trans debate.

In this short article I argue that the UK government’s decision not to update the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) is more than a missed opportunity. It weaponises the GRA, now an effective instrument of assimilation and containment. The failure to reform the GRA seems like a maintenance of the status quo, but given that the circumstances have significantly changed since 2004, the GRA now explicitly fails trans people, including nonbinary people – and in fact this is the intention. Rather than being a flawed attempt to improve trans lives, the GRA is a well-designed apparatus of biopolitical control that reinforces binary gender and cisnormativity, demanding assimilation in return for recognition.

Since 2023, the UK government's response to the “migrant crisis” has revolved around two controversial flagship policies: the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and the detention of migrants aboard a giant barge. In this short article, I examine the colonial and gendered dimensions of the two policies, finding them to be examples of the coloniality of gender. What this indicates, I suggest, is that the purpose of these policies is not merely to deter potential migrants—particularly LGBTQIA+ migrants—but also to create a political narrative that allows the Conservative Party to garner right-wing votes by participating in high-profile culture wars; namely, the debate over transgender rights and the debate over how the UK should reckon with its imperial past.

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must.

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies to explore the connections between narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, and colonial narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement—an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity—I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Protagonist Aster’s neuroqueer refusal indexes the concomitance of the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that will, unless repurposed, continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics.

On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, granting prime minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. The very next day, the government repealed the legal recognition of transgenderism, ruling that assignations of biological sex are binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not coincidental. As I argue in this short essay, Orbán’s move was itself a kind of assignation, an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation. Drawing on Derrida’s motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán’s law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán’s placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida’s.