Jana Cattien

This paper is a critique of the common-sense view of pain and the role it plays in contemporary political life. I argue that the common-sense understanding of pain as a uniform and universal human experience has insidious political effects. It makes pain recognisable only insofar as the subject-in-pain becomes an object-like container of pain. I show that this feature of the common-sense view reflects a larger contradiction in contemporary politics, whereby subjective testimony is superficially championed, but only in the sense that subjects act as vessels of their own experience and sensations. On the common-sense view, subjects simply ‘have’ pains and those pains are necessarily ‘bad’. Pain is not constituted subjectively, through the subject’s own interpretations of its inner sensations; it is simply the effect of a pathological process in the body that must be stopped. Insofar as subjective interpretations do not matter to the ontological make-up of pain, the subject is effectively reduced to being a container of pain – it contains, but does not interpret, configure or constitute, a given object called pain. I show how this ‘container’ view of the subject pervades and structures the contemporary politics of pain, with self-defeating effects for social justice efforts. From feminists rallying around ‘women’s pain’, white slavery abolitionists purportedly ‘empathising’ with black pain, liberals making promises of the ‘painless good life’, to anti-abortion activists deploying the spectre of foetal pain, pain offers everywhere the temptation of hermeneutic and ontological givenness in this unstable and polarised world – a thing we can at least all agree on is necessarily ‘bad’. I argue that we should resist this temptation, and instead include contestations over the meanings of pain in our struggle over the terms of shared life.

Feminist debates around sex have often revolved around the vexed question of whether women can achieve genuine pleasure under patriarchy. Some ‘sex-negative’ feminists have claimed that the entire debate around ‘pleasure under patriarchy’ rests on an ontological mistake: when women say that they experience sexual pleasure with men, what they mean by ‘pleasure’ is actually pain. On this view, pain is assumed to have an objective existence regardless of whatever the subject is experiencing. Positing such a gap between ‘feeling pain’ as a subjective state of affairs and ‘being in pain’ as an objective fact presupposes a ‘detectivist’ theory of subjectivity, whereby the subject is taken to relate to her pain as a reified object. Examining how detectivism has haunted different feminist traditions – from 1970s feminist consciousness-raising and MacKinnon's anti-sex feminism, to contemporary feminist critiques of liberal consent – I argue that a detectivist theory of subjectivity limits the critical horizon of a feminist politics of pain: it ends up politicising marginalised pain only at the cost of falsifying the subjective nature of pain itself.

This essay facilitates a critical dialogue between Freud’s early “cathartic method” and Fanon’s notion of a “neurotic situation.” Although Fanon does not explicitly develop this concept as a counterpoint to the Freudian understanding of neurosis, we can nevertheless glean from his work a robust understanding of the kind of psycho-political suffering it designates. To be in a “neurotic situation,” I argue, is to experience neurotic symptoms that are idiosyncratic to oneself and yet also a reflection of social and political structures of oppression that affect all members of an oppressed group. It is a situation that contains both idiosyncratic psychic disturbance and non-idiosyncratic political truth. As such, addressing a neurotic situation requires overcoming the strict separation between therapy and consciousness-raising that some activists espouse. Specifically, in a neurotic situation, therapy and emancipatory consciousness-raising come to shape and condition each other’s objectives: an emancipatory consciousness becomes a condition for the therapeutic alleviation of neurotic symptoms, and therapeutic relief for neurotic symptoms becomes part of what it is like to attain an emancipatory consciousness in a neurotic situation.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. What is cultural ‘appropriation’? What is cultural ‘appreciation’? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another’, whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere ‘exploration’: ‘Appreciation explores whatever is there’. These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is appropriated was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation.

Alias Grace is just one of the many recent TV shows that was labelled ‘feminist’ so quickly and with such ease that one is left to wonder how much of a genre ‘feminism’ has already become. This article interrogates what is at stake for ‘feminist’ critique in labelling cultural phenomena as ‘feminist’. I argue that certain ways of reading Alias Grace as a ‘feminist’ show preclude an alternative reading in which Alias Grace emerges as a critique of ‘feminism’ itself. What is at stake in the debate on ‘feminism’ in popular culture is thus not only whether or not we can recognise the potential for ‘feminist’ critique that resides within popular culture, but also whether or not we can allow socio-cultural phenomena, like TV shows, to take ‘feminism’ as an object of critique: to generate the kind of critical movement that renders futile any attempt to stabilise, or reify, the signifier ‘feminism’ as an ahistorical object with fixed meanings – as a genre even. In so doing, I take it that there is no privileged site from which to engender such movement; and I do not take popular culture as a self-contained domain that could qualify for being such a site. The point, then, is not to treat Alias Grace as a representative case study in popular ‘feminism’; but rather, to demonstrate, by way of Alias Grace, the complex and contradictory readings that socio-cultural phenomena are amenable to, and which in turn give rise to critical possibilities that unfold from within these phenomena. Reading Alias Grace critically, as I understand it in this article, means allowing it to be, at one and the same time, a reflection on itself and a reflection on the world in which it so quickly comes to be labelled ‘feminist’.

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.