Editors’ Introduction–April issue

As the world braces against new modes of power, domination and authoritarianism, the articles in this quarter’s issue of Theory & Event address multiple modes of state violence, while also focusing on vibrant and unruly forms of resistance in pop culture, movement activism, indigenous politics, and gender politics. Moving between radical claims for indigenous sovereignty to microdosing, they explore the roles injury, imperfections, and victimhood play in our political identity—but also how joy, connections to others, and reappropriation can work in tandem with pain or against it, to open up new political horizons. Ramzi Fawaz’s “Webbed Attachments” reads the animated film Spider-Man Into and Across the Spider-Verse (2018) to think creatively, deeply, and uniquely about the attachments at the basis of subjectivity. These are attachments to others and to notions of self, but also, as he shows, to modes of being injured. And Fawaz argues that these attachments have come to shape left-wing identitarianism. Too often, he claims, the Left’s pursuit of social justice and political freedom is too attached to injury as a violation of some phantasmatic wholeness we seek to restore or defend (seemingly coherent gender, sexual, and racialized subjectivities). As an alternative, Fawaz proposes an exploration of psychedelic experiences, to think about the desire to commune freely, about other modes of political desires, and about new modes of freedom—and Left politics—that can emerge from psychedelic ways of being together: connected (webbed) despite, against, and with differences.

Also engaging with the limits and contours of identity, and the possibility of moving beyond them, is Veronica Zebadúa-Yáñez’s “Genre-bending / Gender-bending.” Examining the social contract as a “genre-bending” form of writing, which does “political theory through fiction and fiction as political theory,” as she writes, Zebadúa-Yáñez follows Monique Wittig in her imaginative and figurative re-reading. She further “bends” social contract stories to repurpose them for feminist ends (“gender-bending”). With and through Wittig, the article seeks to re-envision the language, mythology, standpoint, and political orientation of the social contract as a genre. To tell the contract story in new ways, Yanez proposes to read it as a narrative tool rather than through arguments. Such a textual engagement allows us not just to tell its stories differently, but to do different things with it. Above all, “Genre-bending / Gender-bending” performs such readings to conjecture alternative feminist histories as a way of setting the story of the contract—and political theory—free from dominant ideologies of domination.

The links between gender and resistance appear more literally (or more materially) in Karen Zivi’s “There Will be Blood.” Her contribution examines how menstrual blood is intentionally used in practices of political resistance, and at stake for Zivi, too, is the exploration of new possibilities of both subjectivity and counter-politics. Against discourses of disgust, purity, and shame, Zivi shows how various activists harness the negative stigma of menstrual bleeding to make political claims. She looks at how the No Wash protest by Northern Irish republican women in Armagh prison in 1980, the South African Women for Water protest of 2009, and Kiran Gandhi’s running of the London Marathon in 2015, all contest naturalized forms of bodily privilege and power by tapping into “deep-seated fears” of menstrual blood.

In “Joyful Warriors”: The Affective Politics of Parental Mobilizations in the U.S.,” Nazli Konya examines gender and power from an opposing register. She investigates right-wing parental activism over school curricula on race, gender, and sexuality in terms of its structure of feelings. These affects, combining joy and victimhood, moral righteousness and persecution, enable parents to apprehend themselves as sovereign entities speaking on behalf of the American people while infusing state policy and civil discourse with the power to limit what can be taught in school. Their affective energy undermines the civic-educational prerequisites for a multiracial democracy while also mobilizing joy in the effort.

Carlos Arroyo discusses significantly more radical modes of resistance. “Taking over Indigeneity: Sovereignty as Negotiation in Mexico” examines the 2020 takeover of the main building of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) in Mexico City by a Zapatista organization, arguing that we should understand quests for basic infrastructure and labor rights as demands for Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous resistance here has a complex relationship to Mexican state power, as it is materially grounded in the demand for basic infrastructures. The push for sovereignty is thus rooted in navigating relations with the Mexican state, and does not rely only on opposition to statist development to achieve a measure of self-determination.

Brian Massumi addresses violence from a different register in his contribution, “Preemption Today.” He updates his formative work on “preemption,” which was the official military doctrine of the Bush administration’s war on terror: it justified war in Iraq and Afghanistan by claiming the war would “preempt” other countries’ ability to threaten the United States. Massumi examines the effects of preemption today, which exists globally as an operative logic for justifying state violence by claiming to stop threats before they even emerge as threats. In Massumi’s words, “The operative logic of preemption translates, on the discursive level of logic, into a closed, tautological loop in which the conclusion retrospectively justifies itself by the indeterminacy of its premises.” Seeing preemption at work in China’s attacks on Uyghurs, MAGA conspiracy theories, and AI learning models, Massumi argues that preemption now shapes not only state logics, but also those of capital and daily life.

In “Why Columbia University Dismantled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn examines logics of violence as they shape college campuses. He proposes we view Columbia University’s decision to dismantle the Gaza encampment in April 2024 within the long history of universities’ constitutions in the United States. Kaufman-Osborn examines the legal formation of Columbia— as an example for many other American universities—as an autocratic corporation organized around the principle of property accumulation and property protection. By looking at the encampment from the perspective of the relations between private and public spaces, this article opens up new ways of thinking about political resistance and contestation, as well as about the foundations of higher education in the U.S.