Making and Unmaking of Life:Violence, Feminism, and the Politics of Justice, 1980s to the Present

This is a version of my Jonathan Cooper Memorial Lecture at the Mansfield College, Oxford, May 2026. The lecture was supported by the Sigrid Rausing Trust and organized by Helen Mountfield (Principal of the Mansfield College), Matt Cook (the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality), and Asima Qayyum (Executive Assistant to the Principal).

I never met Jonathan Cooper, but it turns out that we shared some good friends, who praise his enthusiasm, kindness, sense of humour, enjoyment of nature, and gifts for friendship and love. I say these things before mentioning his remarkable career as a legal and human rights campaigner because it was Jonathan’s emotional, sensual, empathetic life that made him so fierce and effective in his legal work and activism. He was a powerful figure in AIDS activism and the rights of asylum seekers; in the organizations ‘Liberty’, ‘Justice’, and the Human Dignity Trust; in promoting and educating others about the Human Rights Act of 1998. He was lauded for his work as an attorney with Doughty Street Chambers; as a persistent challenger of discrimination against same-sex couples; and as a fervent anti-Brexit campaigner. I was thinking of his extraordinary life as I wrote this talk.

To Survive,

Let the past

Teach You.

So wrote Octavia Butler in Parable of the Talents, an Afrofuturist novel set in 2032. She published the novel in 1998, at a time when she feared that America was sleepwalking into fascism. She had not intended the book to be prophetic. ‘Writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future’, she acknowledged, adding, however, that speculative fiction ‘does encourage me to use our past and present behaviours as a guide to the kind of world we seem to be creating’. For Butler in the late 1990s, that world was one marked by racist violence and the colossal funding of the carceral (prison) state with its racist underpinnings and defunding of social welfare provisions, with equally harmful effects. It was a world  dominated (as she put it) by ‘the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered’. Presidents from both Republican and Democratic parties (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton) were loudly pledging to ‘Make America Great Again’, a slogan repurposed by Donald Trump. But, as Butler explained in 1998, ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters’. Thirty years from 1998 – that is our present.

In recent years, I have found myself reflecting on my career spent trying to understand the over-blown, breathless, and carnivalesque languages associated with violence – more the ‘unmaking’ than the ‘making’ of life. Although I won’t be exploring international armed conflicts today, I cannot help but be affected by what is happening in the world as I write this talk – Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, and Lebanon, to name just four. It is not possible to stand outside the spectacle of this toxic, militarist nationalism, in which large swathes of the American population have been

·      insisting that their racialized and gendered entitlements are being ‘taken’ by immigrants, feminists, and leftists;

·      the rhetoric of ‘human rights’ that Jonathan advocated for is being used to champion white, male supremacy;

·      gender differences are (once again) being vilified, including an obscene obsession with transpeople;

·       ‘Girl Power’ has become a vehicle for a scorched-earth attack on female bodily autonomy;

·      and people wax lyrical about the sanctity of life of a pre-embryonic blastocyst while bombarding entire cities.

Like many people, creative fictions have prompted me to think anew about the world in which we live. Novels, poetry, and art have an uncanny ability to unmake what we think we know, denaturalizing humdrum practices and principles, stretching and then contracting time, providing space to imagine a new making, the ‘not-yet’.

It was with a sense of excitement, then, that I picked up Butler’s Parable of the Talents. It is the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, a hyper-empathetic woman of colour, who creates an alternative, interracial, egalitarian community called Acorn. Rather than promising ‘to make (white) America “great” again’, Lauren seeks to ‘Embrace diversity’, dismantling hierarchies based on racialization, gender, class, sexuality, and ableism.

Violence could not be avoided, however. In the novel, Andrew Steele Jarret wins the American Presidency by taking advantage of the very same fears that he has created. He demonizes immigrants and effectively employs the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. As a totalitarian populist and white strongman for fundamentalist Christianity, Jarret plans to return America to a theocratic dictatorship, resurrecting its ‘glorious past’ by ‘re-educating’ (a euphemism for torture) Americans who have gone ‘astray’. His targets? Feminists and other non-subordinate women; people of colour and university experts; Muslims and other ‘heathens’ – in fact, anyone not following his understanding of ‘God’s plan’. Jarret

wants to take us back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

Clad in ‘belted black tunics’ with ‘big white crosses on their chests’, Jarret’s paramilitary ‘Crusaders’ attack Acorn, torturing, raping, and enslaving members, as well as kidnapping their children to be fostered by true evangelical Christians. One of these children is Lauren’s daughter Larkin (renamed Asha) who, despite the fact that the people who adopt her are sexually as well as emotionally abusive, prefers the security of the Christian nation to the chaos of the street. She becomes an historian – but an historian who only looks nostalgically back to an imagined past, not forward to a better world.

The Parable of the Talents is a good novel to ‘think with’ our times. The novel’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (which Butler borrowed from President Reagan, who first used the phrase during his successful bid for the White House in 1980), provoked escalating executive authority, restrictions on who constitutes the political community, and increasing economic inequality and environmental catastrophe. The novel presents an opening to talk about some of the themes I want to address today, including the ‘long wars’ as well as the ‘culture wars’, the advent of Christian ethnonationalism which has encouraged what I term ‘wound nationalism’, shifts in the sexualization and racialization of gender-based violence, and the trope of ‘resilience’ replacing that of ‘trauma’.

My starting point is the ‘long war’ or ‘war without end’, concepts common not only in Afrofuturist critiques like Butler’s, but also in Republican and Christian nationalist circles today. As concepts focussing on cultural phenomenon (as opposed to foreign relations, where they have been fixtures since the Cold War), the ‘long war’ can be traced to the 1990s, with the advent of a right-wing rhetoric insisting that America had been plunged into ‘culture wars’. The basic ideas of a ‘culture war’ and its chief spokesmen would have been well-known to Butler as she wrote her two Parable novels (the first was published in 1993; Parable of the Talents, five years later). They were men like paleoconservative and two-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan who, during the 1992 Republican National Convention, infamously informed the assembly that

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

It is a comment that Jarret can be heard espousing in Parable of the Talents.

However, the term ‘long war’ saw a massive resurgence after 9/11, when numerous political and military spokesmen, including General George W. Casey, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, declared that ‘We are operating in an era of persistent conflict’, a time when Americans need to ‘develop mental, emotional, and spiritual armor’ in order to become ‘better prepared warriors for the “long war”’.

As these very familiar quotations suggest, one of the most formidable weapons in the arsenal wielded by ‘culture warriors’ is the militarization of critique – which, you will note, even this sentence executes (by referencing ‘weapons’, ‘arsenals’, and ‘warriors’). Anti-militarists have long cautioned against using war metaphors outside of armed struggles, warning that such metaphors deflate the lethal horrors of actual hostilities. Perhaps more relevant in our context, however, is the way that interpreting cultural and ideological ‘differences’ as part of a ‘war’ further cements rigid animosities, contributing to processes of emnification and lining up a host of ‘differences’ into two warring ‘sides’, one of which is a righteous crusade; the other, godless revolt. It contributes to a particular, ethnonationalist framing of the world as a dangerous place, dominated by devious and probably ‘perverted’ experts, intellectuals, and ‘mainstream’ as well as left-leaning politicians. In the past, I suggested that the term ‘culture wars’ pretends that ‘culture’ is outside of ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’, but that no longer holds: in recent decades, what used to be an invisible component of ‘culture’ (that is, ‘political whiteness’) has become hyper-visible, pitted against so-called ‘Other’ values and practices which are now posited as direct threats to a ‘real America’ under threat. If I had to choose just two statistics that sum this up, the first would a recent poll that found that almost 70 per cent of Republicans and more than half of Democrats believe that ‘changing demographics’ poses ‘a threat to white Americans and their culture and values’. The second would be the finding that over three-fifths of white evangelical Protestants and two thirds of all Republicans believe that discrimination against white Americans is as big a problem as discrimination against racialized minorities.

I have written about these things in a different context, specifically the ways in which the ‘long, culture wars’ contributed to the rise of what I called ‘wound nationalism’ in modern America (see my blog of that name). ‘Wound nationalism’ thrives in cultures preoccupied with a sense of material, psychological, and moral injuries. There are material realities to their grievances, but the ‘wound’ lies not the materiality: if it was, ‘wound nationalism’ would thrive most strongly in disadvantaged, minoritized communities; and white, Christian nationalists would not span liberal, conservative, rural, suburban, and inner-city communities. Rather, ‘wound nationalism’ is about a profound sense of aggrieved entitlement, or the notion that the American ‘soul’ is being actively and purposefully attacked by multiculturalists, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, abortionists, feminists, and ‘snowflakes’, along with champions of gender ideology, affirmative action, ‘political correctness’, and university courses in the Arts and Humanities (it is distressing to discover that three-fifths of Republicans and nearly one-fifth of Democrats believed that Higher Education has a negative influence on the nation).The densely entangled intersectionality of these ‘enemies’ – for example, they could be, simultaneously, a feminist, gender-diverse immigrant reading History in Oxford – has resulted in certain groups taking the brunt of the onslaught. As critical race theorist Ann duCille wittily put it, ‘one of the dangers of standing at the intersection’ is the ‘likelihood of being run over’.

Human representatives of a Christian God are driving some of those vehicles of destruction. Using tropes that have become familiar to us today, the authoritarian President Andrew Steele Jarret (in Butler’s Parable of the Talents) tells his followers that

America was God’s country and we were God’s people and God took care of his own…. These people… these pagans are not only wrong. They’re dangerous. They’re as destructive as bullets, as contagious as plagues, as poisonous as snakes to the society they infest…. They are lovers of Satan, seducers of our children, rapists of our women, drug sellers, usurers, thieves, and murderers.

Jarret’s sermon conjures up not only of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s when Butler was writing, but the conspiracies of our time of Q-Anon, with its deep state, satanic worship, manospheric fury, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and ‘rampant paedophilia’ (Pizzagate et al).

It also draws attention to shifts within evangelical Christianity in their strategies for fortifying power while ensuring God’s continued ‘blessings’ on their nation. Attempts to secure national transformation through spiritual warfare against ‘The Evil One’ (most notably with Billy Graham-type ‘crusades’ with Jesus as ‘our Great Commander’ in the ‘long war’) began declining from the 1980s, when it was feared that revivalist endeavors had failed to bring Americans ‘back to’ Biblical principles. Encouraged by Ronald Reagan’s political campaigns and then presidency, evangelicals increasingly turned to state and federal party-politics to achieve their social as well as spiritual ends.

A central plank in this shift was a scriptural reading of history in which the ‘long war’ is very long indeed: it stretches back in time to Biblical revelation. Under its authority, Christians as different as Pentecostals, charismatics, fundamentalists, Assembly of God (AOGs), Baptists, Presbyterians, and numerous other small, nondenominational churches learn not only that being rejected by ‘the world’ is written in the scriptures but that their persecution (being ‘wounded’) is a testament to their true faith. As evangelical preachers constantly remind their ‘flock’, Jesus informed his disciples that

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also (John 15:18-20).

Claims of being rejected by ‘this world’ are central to social memory within these religious organizations, forming extremely rich theological, communal, and historical narratives for 1) understanding loss and 2) reasserting social belonging around which evangelical communities cohere.

There is one distinctive component that distinguishes the ‘wound nationalism’ espoused by evangelicals from their secular counterparts: it is not only humiliations and insults in the past and present that trouble them. The future place, causality, and sequence of their ‘tribulations’ are already known. For evangelicals, the future is always and already present, as foretold in the scriptures.

There are two important theological structures within evangelical groups: these are post-millennialism and pre-millennialist dispensationalism. Post-millennialists (in whose camp Pete Hegseth belongs, with his tattoo taken from the battle-cry of anti-Muslim crusaders in 11^th century C.E.) believe it’s the job of Christians to start building the Kingdom of God on Earth first, before Jesus’s return to decisively defeat Satan and finally establish the Kingdom of God. In contrast, pre-millennialist dispensationalists (which was developed in the nineteenth century by Brethren preacher John Nelson Darby; contemporary adherents include Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Paula White-Cain, spiritual adviser to Trump) contend that God has made seven ‘dispensations’, or schemes according to which God carries out His purposes towards humanity’. In the final dispensation (which they believe humanity has entered), the Jews will return to Palestine, ‘true’ Christians will be miraculously taken up to Heaven (the ‘Rapture’), after which the Antichrist will reign for seven years, followed by devastating wars (the ‘tribulation’) which will culminate in the battle of Armageddon. Only then will Satan be defeated and Jesus return to establish His global theocracy.

Adherents of both post-millennialism and pre-millennialist dispensationalism were bolstered by the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, and popular books such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels and their numerous spin-offs (films, video games, graphic novels, and music) from 1995 onwards.

9/11 only strengthened their beliefs: one in every four Americans believe that 9/11 is prophesied in the Bible (although none have been able to tell me exactly where) and nearly 60 per cent of Americans believe it is proof that the events predicted in Revelations are about to come true (although, because ‘God’s time is not ours’, decades may pass). Although this is predominantly a trend within evangelical circles, with 67 per cent of evangelical Protestants and 76 per cent of Black Protestants in 2022 believing that they are ‘living in the End Times’, it also includes half of all Christians in non-evangelical ministries and forty per cent of Americans of any denomination or none.

There is a foreign policy dimension to these debates. Christian nationalists are ardent Zionists; they recite God’s promise to Abraham that ‘I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse’. Violence is a natural outcome of violating God’s will by supporting the Palestinian state (it is used to ‘explain’ the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) or removing Jewish settlers from Gaze (Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had a stroke). After Sharon’s stroke, Pat Robertson said ‘The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, “divide my land”…. And for any prime ministers of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, “No this is mine”’. This belief was used to explain 9/11 since it happened at a time when Bush and the Secretary of State Colin Powell were devising a plan to ‘divide Israel and create a Palestinian state’. So ‘the God of Israel lifted His protection’. In other words, negotiating or making concessions with Palestine is going against God’s will and will be punished.

Unsurprisingly, Christian nationalists are also keen militarists. Because the Antichrist is described in the Bible as an internationalist who creates a world-order through peace-making (posited as a negative trait), Christian nationalists dislike international agencies including the United Nations and the European Union. They are blasé about violence, whether environmental (climate change) or militarist (wars in the Middle East), because, firstly, violence has been ordained by God as heralding in the End Times and, secondly, for many dispensationalists, human actions can bring forward the Rapture. This helps explain why Christian nationalists actively support military interventions in wars in the middle east (in 2003, for example, 87 per cent of white evangelicals supported the invasion of Iraq compared to 59 per cent of American overall). Iran has a special place in End Time thinking, since Ezekiel 38-39 is interpreted to mean that the worldwide catastrophe will be sparked by Iran attacking Israel.

As we have seen during the current military attacks, there has been an intensification of Christian-nationalist’s obsession with 1) establishing Christendom across the Middle East, starting with Iran, in preparation for Christ’s return and 2) the Rapture (note the global furore in September 2025 when Joshua Mhlakela predicted the rapture on 23th/24th), Armageddon, and the imminent return of Christ. In both cases, it has led to ‘unrestricted euphoria’ about the approaching ‘End Times’ amongst commanders and senior military officers rallying their troops with claims that Trump has been ‘anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’. Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary of War whose tattoos (as mentioned) not only include the Latin phrase ‘Deus Vult’ (God Wills It: the battle cry of anti-Muslim Crusaders in the 11^th century C.E.), but also the Jerusalem Cross (a white Christian nationalist symbol) was prepared to lead the charge.

For anyone raised in an evangelical, Pentecostal home, as I was, and familiar with the acceleration of End Times talk following 9/11 (which, incidentally, was exacerbated when the lockdowns of Covid-19 drove evangelicals globally into the much more cynical embrace of largely American televangelists), the radicalization of evangelicalism is as much about domestic as international politics. God’s retributive prerogatives go well beyond End Times prophecy. The war is ‘long’, ‘without end’ (until the Rapture for True Believers and the Tribulation for the rest of us), and all-encompassing. Every aspect of life, every minutiae of living, is folded into God’s plans: politics (the urge to create a theocracy), education (Christian schooling), health (the sinister politics of vaccines and masking-wearing), and sex (promiscuity, abortion, gender-ideology). Nothing is random; nothing, accidental. There can be no bystanders; there are only those ‘for’ God and those ‘against’ Him.

This is why Evangelicals have moved increasingly towards the position that they need to intervene in government to force through policies reflecting ‘God’s values’. And Trump is ‘their man’. In both 2016 and 2024, over 80 per cent of white evangelical Christians voted for a man who had been married three times, engaged in tax fraud, admitted to numerous affairs, used vulgar language, paid-off a porn-star, had been accused of sexual assaulting multiple women, and bragged about ‘grabbing pussies’. Even in 2020, 55 per cent of white evangelicals believed that Trump was being ‘called by God to lead at this critical time in our country’. They turned to scriptures, candidly admitting that, although Trump is flawed, even ‘imperfect vessels’ can be used by God to fulfil ‘His ends’ (see Romans 13:1: ‘there is no authority except that which God has established’).

And then there is Trump’s support of Israel [which, in the past couple of months, may be his downfall if extremist commentator Tucker Carlson has his way]; his promises to stack the Supreme Court with socially-conservative, anti-abortion, judges; his rhetoric about white heterosexuality; his anti-immigration stance, his disdain for separatist powers and international institutions, and so on.

We should not neglect performative aspects as well. Trump’s me-against-the-world persona mirrors their own sense of being besieged by malign forces in the world. They share the same enemy-outsiders. Trump’s critique of elites and his disdain for secular powers such as human rights law, equity provisions, and international institutions, appeal to evangelical political frameworks. In her book entitled In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019), political theorist Wendy Brown expresses this concisely in the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment, or white grievance politics which not only leads to a ‘permanent politics of revenge’ but also to an attraction to leaders who dismiss conventional norms of polite speech, diplomacy, and civic respect. There is something thrillingly defiant about Trump’s blustering ‘sprezzatura’ or, to paraphrase musician Leonard Cohen, his performance as the drunk in the presidential choir.

Important amongst these values is a heterosexual, hierarchical model of the family and fetal protectionism (known in religious circles as ‘fetal salvation’). I do not wish to imply that these so-called ‘family values’ were what catapulted evangelicals into direct engagement in state and federal politics. Other historians (including Randall Balmer) have made convincing arguments about the centrality of financial incentives, specifically, that political attempts to strip non-tax status from racially discriminatory religious schools (like Bob Jones University) provoked this shift by threatening crippling economic losses on evangelical institutions. However, questions of sexuality and reproduction certainly roused ‘the flock’. Because those who are ‘for’ God will be blessed and rendered strong, LGBTQ+ rights and ‘gender ideology’ are a direct threat to American flourishing.

White women have played major roles in campaigns undermining civil, sexual, and gender rights. No surprise here: there is a long history of white women arguing against extending the franchise to women of colour; they were key players in arguments against desegregating schools; and, with only two exceptions, white women have voted Republican in every presidential election sincee the 1950s. This is despite the fact that attacks on welfare systems, restrictions on bodily autonomy, the delegitimization of public services, the positioning of public employees as part of the corrupt or ‘woke’ elite, and the rewarding of personal loyalty over competence are all more harmful to women than men. White women are ideologically aligned with right-wing populism because it serves their interests in preserving both white privilege and heteronormativity. Disaggregating the category ‘white woman’ shows this even more clearly. It is white heterosexual and married women who vote for Republicans, not single, divorced, separated, or widowed women, let along LGBTQ+ ones. As Dara Z. Ztrolovitch, Janelle S. Wong, and Andrew Proctor conclude in their 2017 article in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities, women’s voting behaviour is

related to their positions within both racialized and heteropatriarchal orders. The more distant they are from the benefits of and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates.

White middle-class women located their vulnerability within narratives of immigrant-danger and ‘Black men’, against which pronatalist policies and sex inequality are either welcomed (Trad-Wives) or are seen as minor irritants that will gradually seep away in a postfeminist, post-liberal world. They lend their support to a ‘wound nationalism’ that promises to recuperate ‘traditional family values’, enhance their social and reproductive roles as mothers, counter allegedly ‘un-American’ practices such as wearing the hijab or burqa, and disable threats posed by secular, inclusive feminism. It would reassert their status as biological reproducers of the nation, or ‘bearers of the collective’, with all the power and status that conferred. They are nostalgic for a past where they can ‘stay at home’, performing the prestigious labour of intensive childcare – driving the kids to extra-curriculum classes and sports events; indulging in luxury consumerism; staging imitations of MasterChef – while leaving the undervalued, most tiresome aspects of housework to be carried out by women-of-colour, the majority of whom were immigrants.

Perhaps more dismaying is the way these domestic policies (which have been exported globally) have driven coalitions between previously antagonistic groups, including between so-called ‘radical feminists' and U.S. Christian nationalists, the Catholic Church, Russian Orthodox Church, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. For my purposes today, I am interested in coalitions between so-called ‘gender-critical’ or non-inclusive feminisms (TERFS) and right-wing, evangelical, and Republican organisations such as Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, The Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned Parents and Educators, and so on, despite these conservative organisation’s histories of attempting to limit women’s reproductive rights, prohibit gay marriage and parenting, criminalize Black Lives Matter, and prevent the teaching of Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies. ‘Wound nationalist’, white women may be strange bedfellows with gender-critical/non-inclusive radical feminists, but they share a powerful sense of loss, specifically the removal of certain privileged entitlements and disruptions to ontological certainties.

The unifying banner has been ‘genderism’, blamed for all that is frightening and disturbing in the world, including the social construction of gender, trans and non-binary identities, alternative familial structures, same sex marriage, sex education, reproductive rights, and the ideologies of liberal elites. ‘Genderism’ has even been used as a scapegoat for the pedophile scandals that have enveloped Catholic and Protestant (especially evangelical) churches. The vectors for such evils are inclusive feminist movements and international organizations (such as the UN, EU, and WHO) who are believed to be adopting a notion of human rights that not only protects but also privileges minorities, while dismantling the securities of white majorities.

Coalitions between anti-genderists and conservatives have been remarkably effective in mobilizing the languages of anti-colonialism and human rights. They claim that LGBTQ+ rights are ‘liberal’ or ‘western’ impositions on the Global South. Egalitarianism itself is presented as a form of Western colonialism, fundamentally ‘foreign’ to former colonial peoples. As Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff put it in their wonderfully titled article ‘Gender as “Ebola from Brussels”’ (published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society), antigenderists have created a ‘new language of anticapitalist mobilization’, albeit an anti-liberal, rightwing populist one. They

present themselves as protectors of the world’s colonized peoples, the disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged, whose livelihoods, authentic cultures, and traditional value systems are threatened by neoliberal globalization. An unexamined assumption underlying this worldview is that not only are local and authentic cultural identities always socially conservative and heteronormative but gender conservatism also constitutes this sovereign identity’s central core.

The cooption of languages drawn from human rights are equally important. Take the example of ‘Hands Across the Aisle Coalition’, an American organisation, founded in 2017, with the explicit aim of enabling links between non-inclusive/gender-critical feminists and conservative organizations such as The Heritage Foundation. Hands Across the Aisle state that

For the first time, women from across the political spectrum have come together to challenge the notion that gender is the same as sex. We are radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation, which we have come to recognise as the erasure of our own hard-won civil rights. As the Hands Across the Coalition, we are committed to working together, rising above our differences, and leveraging our collective resources to oppose gender identity ideology.

It is an extraordinary statement, adopting the language of leftism (solidarity), human rights, and transversalism, or coalitions between different groups based on aims, not identities (which I write about in detail in Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence).

More than a decade ago, sociologist Sara Farris coined an important word for such movements: ‘femonationalism’, or the appropriation of feminist and human rights discourses by conservative, nationalist groups in order to promote racist, xenophobic, and aporophobic policies (see her book In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism). Since the 1990s, conservative NGOs, INGOs (International Non-Governmental Organizations), and charities link  1) anti-abortion rhetoric with that of ‘human rights’ and 2) ‘pro-family’ rhetoric, especially the ‘essential role of women in the heteropatriarchal family’, with ‘sustainable economic development’.

Coalitions between non-inclusive/gender critical feminisms and conservative organizations have gained increasing influence within international organizations. The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development was decisive as the moment when a diverse array of opponents of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights came together for the first time to block attempts to diversify definitions of the ‘natural family’ and heterosexuality. Within a dozen or so years, they were a powerful force within the UN.

Conservative, pro-family U.S. groups such as the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), Alliance Defending Freedom, and Family Watch International have Special Consultative ECOSOCH status at the UN. As Haley McEwen and Lata Narayanaswamy’s careful research has demonstrated, these groups have recognized ‘the need to adopt the veneer of a more politically neutral, academic register in how they communicate their key messages’, often fashioning themselves as ‘think tanks’ or INGOs. They portray themselves as employing ‘commonsense’ ideas drawn from a long, established past (see their Working Paper at https://cdn.unrisd.org/assets/library/papers/pdf-files/2023/wp-2023-4-anti-gender-movement.pdf).

Subtle changes in language are important – as in the substitution of ‘equal dignity of men and women’ for ‘equality regardless of gender’.  ‘Fetal protectionism’, ‘fetal salvation’, and claims of a ‘genocide of innocent babies’ persists, but there has been a marked rise in the language of protecting female ‘victims’ from the ‘exploitative and profiteering abortion industry’ and the physical and psychological harms of abortion. This was a deliberate strategy, promoted as early as 1992 when Mark Crutcher, founder of Life Dynamics, published his influential manual entitled Firestorm: A Guerrilla Strategy for a Pro-Life America. In it, he argued that opponents of reproductive technologies should promote their ideas as ‘pro-women’. He admitted that their adversaries are ‘so accustomed to our arguments being focused only on the unborn baby, for us to voluntarily talk about the woman [sic] catches them totally off-guard’. A similar shift can be seen in the anti-trans lobby which, as Claire Thurlow argues in the journal Sexualities in 2024, deliberately adopted the term ‘gender-critical’ as a rebranding to garner mainstream support. In Thurlow’s words, it involved a ‘linguistic pivot from “anti-trans” to “pro-woman”’.

On a wider scale, despite the UN’s commitment to ‘all human beings’ being ‘born free and equal in dignity and rights’, a central strategy has been to make use of Articles 16.1 and 16.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects the ‘right to marry and to found a family’ and states that ‘the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State’. These Articles were used by activists like Jonathan Cooper to argue for same-sex marriage and rights, yet in recent years have been perversely employed to advance heteropatriarchal, ‘pro-family’ ends, as McEwen and Narayanaswamy have pointed out. They warn that, in international relations, the language of ‘gender’ becomes that of ‘girls and women’ (usually invisibly marked as heterosexual girls and women of reproductive ages) further reinforcing binary gendered roles. By drawing on the language of ‘girls and women’ and ‘rights’, anti-gender advocates can ‘claim a space within existing development frameworks and human rights instruments (even where… this claim is demonstrably inaccurate)’, creating a ‘guise of decency and respectability around anti-rights discourse and agendas’.

As all of this implies, a central plank in these diverse but linked movements is reproductive governance, which disproportionately targets women of colour and other minoritized groups. None of this is new. Racial governability dates to the founding of the legacy of white settler colonialism and to chattel slavery. Nineteenth-century abortion bans were motivated by fears of the higher reproduction of immigrant Catholic women compared with Protestant women (see Leslie J. Reagan’s When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States 1867-1973). With its focus on reproductive technologies, it flourished between 1900 and the 1940s in the guise of the various eugenic movements.

In the late twentieth century, however, the idea that ‘white people’ were being replaced by people of colour used to be regarded as extremist. White supremacist groups propagated ‘White Genocide’, noticeable in 1972 when White Power, the newspaper of the National Socialist White People’s Party, published an article entitled ‘Over-Population Myth is Cover for White Genocide’. In it, they warned that increased use of birth control by white women would inevitably result in people of colour outnumbering white ones ‘four to one’. In the mid-1980s, such views were popularised by white nationalist David Lane, author of the White Genocide Manifesto. After attacking birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and ‘so-called affirmative action and other nefarious schemes’ (all regarded as responsible for the decline not only of the ‘white race’ but also of masculine entitlements), Lane’s Manifesto concluded with the now-infamous final fourteen words: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’. 1488 (14 words followed by two 8s, which stand for ‘Heil Hitler’, based on ‘H’ as the eighth letter of the alphabet).

Recently, what used to be fringe racial supremacist movements have moved mainstream. Donald Trump has long insisted upon the genetic superiority of himself and his supporters. He is known for his promotion of neoliberal, and highly racialized ableism. Elon Musk is also a proponent of racialized hierarchies, regularly warning that ‘If people [by which he means ‘white people’] don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words’. Today, nearly half of Republicans believe in The Great White Replacement Theory, ‘White Replacement’, ‘White Genocide’, and ‘white race suicide’. Just over one-fifth of Democrats and independents agree.

Opposition to abortion and immigration are linked: at its epicentre are concerns about the racialized bodies of women, in which the ‘white race’ is imperilled by the reproductive fecundity of people of colour, especially immigrants. This biopolitical project insists not only that ‘white Americans’ are at risk of being ‘swamped’ by people of colour, but also that the threat is a deliberate plot by a nefarious and elusive elite.

A historical narrative has provided legitimation, masking its religious basis and making it more congenial to legal discourses. This was revealed most powerfully in the arguments made by the Supreme Court, when justifying overturning Roe v. Wade. In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the majority judges depended on ‘originalism’ to make the claim that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history or traditions and therefore not protected under the 14th Amendment. This imaginary history is based on a nineteenth century ban on abortion while ignoring a much longer history of abortion acceptance prior to ‘quickening’, is what legal scholar Reva B. Siegel calls ‘constitutional memory games’ (see her detailed analysis in the 2023 issue of the Texas Law Review). Siegel asks, ‘Why should nineteenth century antiabortion laws limit the ways we now understand the Constitution’s liberty guarantee any more than the history and traditions of segregation limit the way we understand the Constitution’s equality guarantee?’ And if ‘history’ can be used to eradicate abortion rights then why not same sex marriage? Why not, indeed, ask conservative judges? In Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, philosopher Nancy Tuana has a good phrase for this: the ‘epistemology of ignorance’. In her words, ‘Ignorance is not a simple lack. It is often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty’. It allows denial of the harms caused by one’s beliefs.

In countering such ideological power-grabs, we need to resist the post-9/11 politics of resilience, which is prominent in the explosive growth of self-help literature as much as in politics and the military more broadly. It is also a mantra used too frequently by Democratic leaders during Trump’s administrations. As Robin May Schott and I argue in our 2022 book Resilience: Militaries and Militarization, the concept of ‘resilience, made powerful by its adoption by all branches of the military, quickly made its way into the social imaginary as a framing metaphor used to make sense of people’s social existence and norms, as much as their inner lives. Its appeal drew on specific historical contexts that included a religious tradition in the U.S. that emphasized the positive power of the mind – most notably, the power of prayer (not only the direct appeal to a Protestant God but also through priestly intermediaries). There are powerful secular equivalents, too, including the mental hygiene movement of the early twentieth century and, in the mid-twentieth century, the ‘power of positive thinking’ (a la Norman Vincent Peale’s bestseller of that name). Its attraction was also due to the ‘father of Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman, and his use of psycho-scientific methodologies to claim that an emphasis on ‘resilience’ could solve two crises: firstly, of the ‘long war’ in the armed forces (soaring levels of mental health breakdown and demoralization within an all-volunteer force) and, secondly, of American society more widely, specifically, status anxiety among the white working- and middle-classes. This second appeal was a highly racialized and classed phenomenon premised on aggrieved entitlements.

The popularity of ‘resilience’ grew immeasurably after 9/11 when the terrorist attack on U.S. soil led to calls for tighter connections between military and civilian lives. The result was a radical shift in the way ‘bad events’ were narrated. I don’t have time to trace the longer history of human responses to ‘bad events’ – soldiers’ heart and ‘nostalgia’ during the American Civil War, ‘railway spine’ in the 1860s, shell shock in World War One, ‘war exhaustion’ in World War Two – (I have published extensively about these). Instead, to illustrate the magnitude of the shift, I will start in 1980 when PTSD was invented and entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the ‘Bible’ of the American Psychological Association and its chief diagnostic manual, with global reach.

Crucially, and unlike previous conceptualizations based on the harms of industrialization and war, the DSM named two gender-based paradigmatic traumas: war for men; rape for women. In addition, while previous conceptualizations contained an underlying implication of malingering or scrimshanking, the diagnosis of PTSD allowed for a degree of societal responsibility: for disturbed servicepersonal, disability pensions; for rape survivors, carceralism (‘lock up the perps and throw away the key’).

This changed in the C21st, when ‘trauma’ was replaced by ‘resilience’, a normalisation of ‘bad events’ within neoliberal and then neo-conservative economies. This was what Octavia Butler foresaw in Parable of the Talents, when Lauren’s daughter Larkin/Asha is portrayed as becoming consumed with the virtual reality of Dream-masks, which allows her to escape the pain caused by a dictatorial theocracy: her ‘resilience’ (through virtual means) to the oppressive world is in contrast to her mother’s resistance to ‘trauma’.

The shift from PTSD to ‘resilience’ assume that vulnerability and suffering are intrinsic to the ‘long war’, whether within the military or white working- and middle-class civilian worlds. The concept of ‘resilience’ brushes aside relationships of power and structural inequality. Psychological breakdown is due to ‘choice’: a failure to having taken precautions to ‘build up resilience’ prior to the (inevitable and normal) traumatic event. ‘Resilience rhetoric’ imagines trauma to be internal to the system – especially the distress caused by foreseeable ‘bad events’ such as job precarity, status anxiety, and widening inequality typical of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The dominant message is of ‘post-trauma growth’: trauma has ‘the ability to make you stronger’. In the words of common memes: ‘You Can’t Get a Pearl Without Grit’, ‘bend like a tree in the wind’, and ‘metals become purer through application of intense heat’. There is no space left for political, ideological, and institutional critique.

*

            I don’t intend this talk to be depressing! As Octavia Butler contended,

There may be nothing new

under the sun,

But there are new suns.

What are we to do?  My talk has been about power, entitlement, and ideology – but it is also about the mobilization of a religious rhetoric that has deep roots in U.S. society, even amongst non-believers. I don’t need to remind anyone that more is at stake than ‘just’ hate speech – very real, lethal policies are being enacted and enforced by people who hold unwaveringly to their spiritual beliefs and social entitlements. Writing in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, one critic (whom I greatly admire) argues that ‘people experience structural social injuries as traumas when they do not possess adequate analyses of the processes or formations that have harmed them’. But this is to miss the point entirely. As I mentioned earlier, there are extremely rich – theological, communal, and historical – narratives for understanding loss and reasserting social belonging – and many of these languages stem from (bastardized) Christian texts. In the ‘long war’ against the forces of evil – both in this world and the world to come – eternal lives are at stake. Furthermore, the experience of social injuries is framed less as ‘traumas’ and more as inducements to ‘resilience’. The ‘imperfect vessel’ (the strategic Christian’, Donald Trump) may be exchanged for another, but the outcome will be the same.

Some of the bulwarks we expected to hold, have not. International law has proven impotent: as Trump put it, ‘He who saves his country does not violate any law’. Domestic legislation has been disappointing. It turned out to be remarkably easy to ‘stack’ the Supreme Court. The post-1990s dependency on the carceral system, abandoning principles of rehabilitative, restorative, and transformative justice, have proven highly discriminatory and cruel, as was intended.

Nevertheless, as Jonathan Cooper recognized, we should not minimise the power of bottom-up activism and coalitions of critical networks. Evangelical and ethnonationalist ‘makings’ of the world can be ‘unmade’. In previous works of mine – especially Disgrace: A Global History of Sexual Violence – I found inspiration in the concept of transversalism. Of course, coalitions can be made across well-honed political divisions of Right and Left or feminist/anti-feminist, as I have briefly shown in this talk. As the concept of transversalism originally acknowledged, feminist alliances that do not alter power disparities can do great harm to minoritized people. But because violence cannot be detached from other political, economic and sociocultural inequities, attempts to eradicate it require activists to move attention away from individual perpetrators and victims towards systemic injustices, fuelled by sexism, racism, colonialism, economic injustice, heteronormativity, transphobia, militarism, climate denial and neoliberal capitalisms. In other words, campaigns against violence cannot exist, thrive or transform the world without alliances with other progressive causes.

I am optimistic. And take inspiration from the arts and humanities. Parable of the Talents presents two different responses to fear: Christian American authoritarianism and prejudice; versus Acorn which is an egalitarian political community of people with the courage to resist. In Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents, America is in a state of historical amnesia, recapitulating the horrors of slavery, racism, sexism, colonisation, dispossession, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and contempt of difference. It was a world Butler imagined would exist thirty years after she wrote it – that is, in our times. A time when President Jarret engaged in magical thinking – imagining a world where everyone believed that ‘that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different’. A world where ‘history is just one more vast unknown’. This one of the reasons why historians and other scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and arts are so important in public spheres as debunkers of popular historical narratives, distorted readings of scriptures, and interpreters of possibilities.

I am not being starry-eyed about the power of historical arguments or of the creative energies of the arts and humanities – not even of the uncanny abilities of Afrofuturists novels to unmake and then provide a space to imagine a new making. After all, in the novel, Lauren’s daughter becomes an historian; but, constrained by the circumstances of surviving within an authoritarian, ethnonationalist state, is capable only of resilience, not resistance. Translated into the language of Achille Mbembe in ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’ (2003), historians can choose to work within the chronophagy of the archives, in which memory is manipulated and commodified, enabling distinctions between victims and perpetrators to collapse into each other, as we are seeing amongst ‘wound nationalists’. But we can also choose a different future based on our ability to ‘use our past and present behaviours as a guide to the kind of world we seem to be creating’ and to present ways of stepping away from the precipice.

It is important to notice that Butler’s Parable of the Talents ends with the community leaving earth in a spaceship to found another colony, a more utopian one. Lauren is insistent that this Afrofuturist colonization is ‘not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch’. But there is an ominous element: the spaceship is named ‘Christopher Columbus’. History may have been forgotten after all.

Jonathan Cooper knew this only too well: Human Rights are at risk. Jonathan looked forward to the day when ‘government and all public authorities agreed to be held accountable for conduct which may gave interfered with [these] fundamental human rights principles’. In his words, recognition of ‘universal, inalienable, and inherent civil & political rights…. is essential to the preservation of human dignity’. He also understood that we can also choose a different future based on our ability to ‘use our past and present behaviours as a guide to the kind of world we seem to be creating’ and to present ways of stepping away from the precipice.

I started this talk with Butler’s exhortation ‘To survive/Let the past/Teach you’. But the poem ends with:

To Survive,

Know the past.

Let it touch you.

Then let

The past

Go.

History teaches us that nothing is inevitable, universal, or unchangeable: the ‘making’ of life begins with an ‘unmaking’ of the recent past.

If you enjoyed this blog, you might be interested in other blogs, including:

'Wound Nationalism’, 'Sex/Gender Exclusions and Transversalism Revisited', 'Fragments from my Autobiography', and 'Human Rights: Are they Universal?'.

The photo at the start of this blog was by Eugene Golovesoy on 'Unsplash'.