Wound Nationalism: ‘Culture Wars’ and the Politics of ‘The People’

(This is the spoken version of the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, that I gave at the conference ‘We The People’, Irish Association for American Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 25 April 2025. It is not the ‘final’ version, since I will continue to work on it, but gives a taste of my ideas.)

‘We the People’. The preamble to the Constitution of the United States (1789) declares that ‘We the People of the United States… do ordain and establish this Constitution’. In the French Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen(1789), it is ‘the representatives of the French people… recognize and declare, in the presence and under the auspices of the Superior Being, the following rights of man and citizen’. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland similarly states that ‘We, the people of Éire… do hereby enact and give to ourselves the Constitution’. Other countries have established similar foundational principles.

The declarative ‘We The People’ has provoked centuries of political, philosophical, and sociological commentary. The phrase takes its authority from its performative quality, creating what it purports to describe, generating national as well as nationalist imaginings. The question – who are ‘The People’? – is contested. This is hardly surprising since the ideas, values, and practices used to justify the sovereignty of a particular understanding of ‘The People’ is what creates society and social life. In every period of history and every culture, seemingly commonsensical constructions of ‘The People’ exist, but delineations of who is ‘in’ and ‘out’ are always being invented, undermined, and re-constructed.

To understand the instability of definitions of who are truly ‘The People’ in American society, we need history. By looking back into the past, we can trace competing ways in which people are imagined to be part of, or excluded from, an imagined community. Categorizations of ‘The People’ have been at the heart of American populism. Etymologically, the term derives from the Latin populus, meaning ‘for people’. Although there is no consensus of what populism ‘is’ (is it an ideology, a political strategy, a style, a rhetorical strategy, a schema, or an emotion?), populists routinely claim that only they can identify ‘The People’. At a speech given at the founding of the People’s Party in Omaha in 1892, former Republican congressman Ignatius Donnelly declared that: ‘We seek to restore the Government of the Republic to the hands of the “plain people” with whom it originated’. His statement neatly summarizes some of the chief tenets of U.S. populism: that is, a suspicion of ‘elites’, a belief in the existence of an identifiable ‘pure people’, and a rhetoric that appeals to ‘commonsense’. Current iterations of populism tend towards illiberalism and anti-pluralism. Populists claim they speak for the ‘silent majority’, a ‘people’ whose interests have been ‘drowned’ under the ‘wave’ of immigration, elite manoeuvrings, and scheming, self-interested politicians.

As a response to the dizzying range of pluralities that characterizes modern societies, ‘The People’ identified under populism is something that is done rather than something that exists a priori. ‘The People’ is a volatile mass; it is always constituted, but never complete. There are openings for contestation. At the same time, however, constructions of ‘The People’ are policed with demonic precision. Delimiting ‘The People’s’ territory not only involves violence but inspires it. 

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In recent decades, debates about who are the ‘True People’ of America have revolved around the ‘culture wars’. The term catapulted into public discourse in 1991 after James Davison Hunter published Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. He declared that America had split into two polarized camps, each claiming the moral authority to ‘define America’ and to establish the ‘domination of one cultural and moral ethos over all others’. The ‘culture wars’, Hunter claimed, were about ‘how we are to order our lives together’.

Prior to Donald Trump’s presidential election in November 2016, some scholars questioned whether or not the ‘culture wars’ were ‘new’ or even ‘real’. Historians pointed to the nineteenth century, where questions about slavery and temperance deeply divided the entire nation. Social scientists took scalpels to the statistical foundations of Hunter’s thesis, while political scientists insisted that it was the elites who were increasingly polarized (and therefore offered voters only polarized choices), rather than the ‘average American’ who preferred more moderate options.

Such academic dissenters were stunned by the rise of Trumpist populism from 2016. Trump was effective in defining ‘The People’ in cultural rather than economic terms. Declaring his preparedness to fight a bloody war around ‘culture’ was Trump’s ‘bread and butter’, or ‘bazooka and bludgeon’.

But even in the 1990s, and despite widespread academic skepticism, the idea of a ‘culture war’ had already caught on, especially with people on the political Right. The chief spokesmen are well-known. In the 1990s, they were men like paleoconservative and two-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan who, during the 1992 Republican National Convention, 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.

The Marine Corps – the bastion of American hyper-masculinity, anti-woke-ism, and ‘war without end’ – was another natural ally. In 1994, to take one example of dozens, the Marine Corp Gazette praised Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 article entitled ‘Clash of Civilizations’, which made the point that conflicts no longer centred on ‘ideological questions’ about the ‘proper organization of society and the economy’ but rather on ‘cultural issues’. The Gazette went on to endorse Hunter’s argument that ‘cultural liberalism’ was leading to a ‘total breakdown in moral standards and restraints’, creating an America that was increasingly a ‘permissive cornucopia’. Such rhetoric heated up after 9/11, most infamously when Jerry Falwell, pastor of a 22,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, informed his listeners that

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘You helped this to happen’.

[We can always depend on good-ol’ Jerry for a juicy quote!]

Rightwing proponents of the ‘culture wars’ sought to ‘Make America great again, white again, and right again’. According to the rhetoric of ‘culture wars’, the Age of Aquarius had been followed by the Epoch of Islamism: both were symbols of everything that was rotten in modern America: multiculturalism, immigration, Islamophilia, gender ideology, affirmative action, feminism, reproductive rights, abortion, LGBTQ+ visibility, ‘political correctness’, ‘snowflakes’, and university courses in the Arts and Humanities. People accused of espousing such ‘liberal’ ideas were catapulted into No Man’s Land as ‘enemies within’. In most cases, the densely entangled intersections of their ‘cultural’ positions – for example, these ‘enemies’ could be feminist, gender-diverse, and non-white immigrants at the same time – resulted in them 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’.

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One of the most formidable weapons in the arsenal wielded by ‘culture warriors’ is the militarization of the entire critique– which, you will note, even this sentence executes (by referencing ‘weapons’ and ‘arsenals’). Anti-militarists have long cautioned against using war metaphors outside of armed struggles, warning that such metaphors deflate the lethal horrors of actual battle. Perhaps more relevant for our context, however, is the way that interpreting ideological and political ‘differences’ as part of a ‘war’ further cements rigid enmities: it contributes to processes of emnification, lining up a host of incommensurate differences into two ‘sides’, one of which is godless revolt; the other, a righteous crusade. It provides a compelling framing of a world as a dangerous place where you cannot trust experts, intellectuals, or ‘mainstream’ politicians. The term ‘culture wars’ also pretends that ‘culture’ is outside of ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’. The ‘culture’ in the ‘culture wars’ is extraordinarily restrictive: some social values and practices are normalized to the extent of invisibility (whiteness, for example) while other values and practices are ‘cultural’ or minoritized, aberrant, even perverted. The concept of ‘culture wars’ offers lazy ideological positions, stripped of history, complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction. As such, the concept of ‘culture war’ emboldens the Right.

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These problems with the framing of ‘culture wars’ contribute to a danger that I will be emphasizing in the rest of this talk: ‘culture wars’ plays into what I identify as the rise of ‘wound nationalism’ in modern America. ‘Wound nationalism’ thrives on a ‘wound culture’, a culture preoccupied with its own sense of material, psychological, and moral injury. Central to ‘wound nationalism’ is a deep sense of aggrieved entitlement, making the ‘injury’ especially distressing. ‘Wound nationalists’ coalesce around four central ideological tenets: first, historically and spiritually, they constitute themselves as ‘The People’ of the American Constitution; second, they lament that their ‘natural’ prerogatives have been ripped asunder, creating a psychological wound; third, they can identify these people (‘elites’, immigrants, feminists, etc.) and institutions (for example, nearly 60 per cent of Republicans and 18 per cent of Democrats believed that Higher Education has a negative influence on the nation) responsible for the wrong done to them; and, finally, they believe that the damage can be repaired and the ‘The True People’ restored to their rightful place. In the rest of this talk, I will discuss the ‘wound nationalism’ in the context of three powerful groups: white evangelicals, white men, and white women.

[Obviously, these three groups overlap in multiple, intersectional ways; I am separating these identities simply for convenience.]

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First: ‘wound nationalism’ and white evangelicals. 71 per cent of Americans identify as ‘Christian’ and, even though ‘evangelical Christian’ means a great many things to different people, more than one-quarter of American Christians identify themselves as evangelicals. More than 55 per cent of these evangelicals are female.

The beating-heart of the ‘culture wars’ is the Evangelical Right’s insistence on the worship of the one-true-God and a fundamentalist reading of the Scriptures. The ‘wound nationalism’ of evangelical Christians is their belief that Christian values have not simply been sidelined, but demeaned, degraded, and destroyed. Over 60 per cent of White evangelicals believe that discrimination against white people is as serious a problem as discrimination against people of colour; two-thirds say that immigrants are a threat (compared with 40 per cent of Americans overall); 87 per cent believe there are only two genders. Rejected by ‘the world’, they portray themselves as ‘injured subjects’. Crucially, they exhibit an exceptionally strong attachment to their ‘wound’.

The ‘wound nationalism’ of white evangelicals has one very distinctive component that distinguishes it from its secular counterparts: it is not only insults in the past and present that trouble them. It is also the known future: their rejection is ‘written in the Word’, that is, the Word of God. For evangelicals, the future is always and already present – indeed, their persecution 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).

The place and causality, sequence and time, of their ‘tribulations’ are already known to evangelicals. Of course, according to prophecy, they will ‘be given’ what they are entitled to, albeit in the yet-to-be-known, God-ordained horizon. It is no coincidence that ‘wound nationalism’ amongst evangelicals has been accompanied by a revival of interest in the Revelations, Rapture, and the Second Coming of Christ, when Jesus and all His disciples will ascend to Heaven and a new Heaven on Earth will be established.

The theological underpinnings of ‘wound nationalism’ among evangelicals help to understand why, in 2016 and 2024, 81 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’. First, their strategy of seeking national transformation through spiritual (predominantly revivalist) means had patently failed. From the 1990s, evangelicals had been increasingly turning to state and federal party-politics to achieve their social and spiritual ends. Second, they candidly admitted that Trump was flawed, but even ‘imperfect vessels’ could be used by God to fulfil ‘His ends’. 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’. Third, after publicly declaring to be ‘born again’, Trump was able to mobilize the Evangelical Right cynically. His me-against-the-world style mirrored their sense of being besieged by malign forces in the world. They shared the same enemy-outsiders. Trump’s critique of elites, his disdain for secular powers such as human rights law, equity provisions, and international institutions, and his promise to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington DC appealed to evangelical political frameworks based on Covenantal Political Theory (that is, sovereignty rests with the people, not king or ruler), Aristotelian Republicanism (citizens run the polis), and Liberalism (emphasis on individualism together with a suspicion of government).

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Second: ‘wound nationalism’ and white men. The form of populism exemplified by Trump is gendered masculine. Trump’s performative style is important. His lack of political decorum, his staged authenticity, and his refusal to ‘follow the rules’ was ‘read’ as ‘strong’; his belligerent, masculinist persona assured voters that here was someone capable of making ‘white men’ great again. Even his blustering ‘sprezzatura’ (that is, speeches designed to sound spontaneous when, in reality, they are highly staged) was appealing. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, he was the drunk in a presidential choir.

Trump energized white men terrified that their racialized and gendered entitlements were being ‘taken’ by immigrants, feminists, and effeminate elites. They applauded Trump’s talk of Hilary Clinton as a ‘nasty woman’, a witch with a problematic ‘temperament’. Father’s and men’s rights groups coopted the rhetoric of ‘rights’ in order to champion male supremacy; they were greatly helped by the explosion of digital communities and communication systems. There is huge cultural as well as political and ideological capital to be gained from male victimhood.

Crucial to the ‘wound nationalism’ of white men was ‘political correctness’. Three quarters of Americans believe that ‘political correctness’ is ‘making it hard for people to say what they really think’. For men, the term ‘PC’ was most frequently used to complain that sexualized norms have changed without their consent: routine catcalls, ‘innocent’ sexual innuendo, and more aggressive forms of sexual predation had been banned, even criminalized. ‘Maleness’ itself is persecuted. Feminists are ‘causing problems’; #MeToo was a plot to emasculate men.

When, one month before the 2016 Presidential election, the 2005 Access Hollywood tape was broadcast, revealing Trump boasting about sexual assault, 84 per cent of Republicans said that it ‘won’t make any difference’. Indeed, pussy-grabbing was a sign not only of Trump’s ‘red blooded masculinity’, but also of his contempt for ‘liberal elites’. White fathers, boyfriends, and husbands stood proudly next to ‘their’ womenfolk who were wearing tee-shirts announcing that ‘Trump can grab my pussy anytime’. In 2016, the top Men’s Rights post was entitled ‘“Sexual Assault” Is Why I’m Endorsing Donald Trump for President of the United States’. As one alt-right moderator on a 2016 Men’s Rights post explained,

When somebody accuses a powerful or famous figure like Trump of ‘sexual assault’, I don’t look the other way. I don’t denounce them or their behavior. Instead[,] I run towards them, because there is no truer sign which side somebody is on, than when they’re given a bogus accusation by the establishment. This is our beacon to find allies in the war.

When white men lined up behind Trump, shouting that ‘We’ must take ‘our’ nation back, the ‘we’ and ‘our’ did not refer to the entitlements of Native Americans, but to disenfranchised, white men. Misogyny and misanthropy were proud, political claims. Some commentators even argue that Trump’s misogyny increased his vote, especially among white men. Political scientists Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew Macwilliams, and Tatishe Nteta found strong evidence that both sexism and racism elicited support for Trump. In their analysis of the 2016 election, racial attitudes and sexism were strongerpredictors of voting for Trump than economic considerations. A similar phenomenon was revealed in analyses of the 2024 election. This was not only true of white men: white voters of both sexes (and there are only two, in their conception) position themselves as ‘the’ embattled and injured racial group.

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Third, the gendered racialization of ‘wound nationalism’ is even more starkly exposed when we turn to white women, despite the fact that it is an aggressive, masculinist politics which damages women. Attacks on welfare systems, 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 potentially harmful to women. This is why many commentators professed to being surprised that Trump proved to be politically attractive to the majority of white women, 53 per cent of whom voted for him in 2024.

Their surprise is unwarranted. The majority of white women see their interests aligned with right-wing populism. With only two exceptions, white women have voted Republican in every presidential election since the 1950s. This fact had gone unnoticed because women of colour overwhelmingly vote Democrat. For example, in 2008, 53 per cent of white women voted for John McCain rather than Obama. In 2012, 56 per cent of white women voted for Mitt Romney rather than Obama. In the later election, 99 per cent of African American women and 73 per cent of Latinas, voted Obama, which is why the Democrats could boast that the majority of women voted Democrat. In the 2016 election, 54 per cent of women voted for Clinton – but this masked the racialization of the vote since, among white women, 52 per cent voted for Trump. In 2016 and 2024, only college-educated white women voted by a majority for the Democrats. Race consistently trumped [in both senses] gender.

Again, this can hardly be surprising since white women have a long history of defining themselves against the Black, female ‘Other’. I don’t need to remind anyone here that they were key voices in arguing against extending the franchise to Black women and desegregating schools, as well as in innumerable other racist policies and practices.

Women in Trump’s administration sincerely believe that individual power can be achieved by aligning themselves with the hetero-patriarchal, white state. Although they recognize misuse of male power when committed by minoritized men, they are less interested in white male structures of power and domination. They are ideologically aligned with populism because it serves their interests in preserving both white privilege and heteronormativity. Disaggregating the category ‘white woman’ shows this even more clearly. After all, marital status made a difference: married women voted for Trump more frequently than single, divorced, separated, or widowed ones. Sexual orientation played a part: heterosexual rather than LGBTQ white women were Trump voters. As Dara Z. Ztrolovitch, Janelle S. Wong, and Andrew Proctor concluded, women’s voting behaviour was

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 with narratives of immigrant-danger and ‘Black men’, against which pronatalist policies and sex inequality were either welcomed or seen as minor irritants that would gradually seep away in a postfeminist world. They lent their support to a ‘wound nationalism’ that promised to recuperate ‘traditional family values’, enhance their social and reproductive roles as mothers, counter ‘un-American’ practices such as wearing the hajab 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. Sara Farris has a good word for this: ‘femonationalism’, or the cooption of feminist and human rights discourses by conservative, nationalist groups in order to promote racist, xenophobic, and aporophobic policies.

Since 2009, such women had been emboldened by the Tea Party movement, whose decentralized political structure enabled white women, especially in their roles as homemakers and mothers, to play significant roles as leaders. Instead of feminist choice, these women emphasized personal responsibility, family protectionism, and (taking their cue from the Boston protests against a British colonial tax on tea) autonomy from ‘big government’ regulations. They insisted that women-as-mothers were needed to prevention the ‘invasion’ and ‘pollution’ of homes, schools, and workplaces by multiculturalists, immigrants, abortionists, and LGBTQ+ activists.

Their version of ‘wound nationalism’ drew support from white women’s resentment of having to juggle unpaid domestic labour with waged employment. They were nostalgic for a past where they could ‘stay at home’, performing the prestigious labour of intensive childcare (driving the kids to extra-curriculum classes and sports events; staging imitations of MasterChef; and indulging in luxury consumerism), while leaving the most tiresome aspects of housework to be carried out by women-of-colour, the majority of whom were immigrants.

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There are two additional components to white women’s investment in ‘wound nationalism’: sex essentialism and reproductive governance. These were not only concerns for white women, but appear more prominently in their political narratives than in white men’s. Both have long and deep histories in American history but I will be using each of these examples as a way of honing in on a couple of important aspects to the debates: ‘sex essentialism’ will enable me to show how current anti-trans politics on the political Right mobilized and distorted ideas that stemmed from 1980s/90s radical feminists; while ‘reproductive governance’ enables me to explore the long American history of eugenics which, in its new incarnation, prioritizes the embryo over its ‘carrier’, that is, pregnant women. In both cases (sex essentialism and reproductive governance), the ’culture wars’ are thoroughly racialized.

[This next section is very much a ‘first draft’ so feel free to skip to the next asterixis. Watch the space, though, since I will be working on it].

Sex binarism have long been a centrepiece of the evangelical right. The attempted erasure of gender and sexual minorities was announced in Trump’s first speech on taking office when he insisted that his administration would only recognize two genders: ‘male and female maketh He’. Since then, a vast array of laws and regulations have been passed limiting access to medical care, slashing welfare provisions, and withdrawing recognition of people identifying as trans.

Again, this is not surprising. There is a very long history of discrimination against sexual and gender minorities in the U.S. Of particular interest, however, is the way the narratives tapped into the ‘culture wars’ within radical feminism in the 1970s and today, which has been coopted by ‘wound nationalist’ women. Both groups champion binary sex differences asinnate, biologically determined, and/or immutable and both claim that the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s was harmful for cis-women. In the 1980s, radical feminists like Alice Echols labelled these women ‘cultural feminists’, a term that was intended to be derogatory. An even stronger label was invented nearly three decades later. This was TERFS, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The term was coined by TigTog, a radical feminist who used the term in an online post on 17 August 2008. Although TigTog later claimed that she had intended TERF to be nothing more than a shorthand way of distinguishing radical feminists who were trans-exclusionary and those who were trans-positive, it rapidly became a term of abuse.

Non-inclusive feminists, which is a more respectful term than TERFs, currently in strategic alliance with female ‘wound nationalists’, regard transgender woman as threats to persons assigned ‘female’ at birth. They seek a nostalgic return to ontological certainty. Crucial to both parties are an espousal of a ‘wounded attachment’ to a female-identity based on suffering. They argue that, from the moment of birth, girls and women are oppressed, which means that people assigned a male sex at birth can never become ‘woman’ because have not been socialized as such, nor have they experienced pervasive subjugation. The anticipated sites of ‘injury’ are gender-free toilets, music festivals, rape and domestic abuse shelters, and sport fields.

‘Wound nationalist’, white women may be strange bedfellows to non-inclusive radical feminists, but they shared a powerful sense of loss and trauma. Both groups feared the removal of certain privileged entitlements; they sought ontological certainties; and they preferred neoliberal, rules-based feminism over inclusive, ‘woke’ iterations.

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Finally, the gendering and racialization of ‘wound nationalism’ appear most starkly in recent attacks on female bodily autonomy, as exemplified in the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022. Reproductive governance has become a central plank in the populist ‘turn’ of the twenty-first century. Current restrictions or absolute prohibitions on abortion have been deeply damaging for many women, who rightly see themselves (as opposed to men) as penalizing them for having sex. Women’s fertility becomes a national resource.

It is no coincidence that the racialized bodies of women have been at the epicentre of the ‘culture wars’. The politics of abortion are inextricably tied to demographic imaginaries, in which the ‘white race’ is imperilled by the reproductive fecundity of people of colour, especially immigrants. Under its various monikers – including ‘Great Replacement Theory’, ‘White Replacement’, ‘White Genocide’, and ‘white race suicide’ – 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, bent on destroying ‘real America’ through immigration, cultural adulteration, promotion of ‘alternative’ sexual/gender identities, ‘mixed’ marriages, and abortion.

Racial governability dates to the founding of the colony. With its focus on reproductive technologies, however, it flourished between 1900 and the 1940s in the guise of the eugenic movement.

In its current iteration, however, white supremacist groups propagated ‘White Genocide’ from 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 (the 8s stand for ‘Heil Hitler’, based on ‘H’ as the eighth letter of the alphabet) was born.

In recent years, what used to be fringe racial supremacy has moved mainstream. Donald Trump has long insisted upon his genetic superiority, frequently tweeting about his ‘high IQ’ and denigrating disabled people. 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.

The ‘solution’ to this imaginary danger has become increasingly eugenic in tone. The regulation of female (but not male) sexuality is part of an attempt to restore ‘natural’ social and political order, which includes male head of household and the exploitation of female domestic labour.

Reproductive governance is highly raced and classed. It is inextricably tied to ideas about women of colour as hyper-fertile as well as hypersexual, and therefore a threat to white racial purity, unlike white bourgeois women. In the 1970s, over one-quarter of indigenous women were sterilized by the Indian Health Service. As late as 2010, women in California prisons were sterilized, often under pressure. In contrast, at the turn of the century, white, middle-class women were routinely denied access to contraception, abortion, and sterilization – something that physicians were willing to impose on poor women and women of colour. In modern times, the ‘women’ who are encouraged or forced to give birth due to severe restrictions on abortion are either explicitly or implicitly visualized as white, middle-class, ‘good’ ones. Anti-abortion spokespeople seek to ‘save’ the foetus and the women who ‘bear’ the foetus from the ‘abortion industry’ – that is, the ‘feminists’ and ‘liberals’ providing abortion services, who they characterize as financial leeches and ‘moral relativists’.

This pronatalist stance sits alongside what can seem to be the opposite: the criminalization of the pregnancies of Black women as well as poor white ones. This is a shift from earlier eugenic policies, which were about the role of women (ensuring they accepted their primary role as mothers), as opposed to the well-being of the fetus (where the carrier of the cells, the pregnant woman, can actually be sacrificed). Women are charged with manslaughter, child abuse, aggravated assault, and even murder when they experience miscarriages or give birth to stillborn babies. States have enacted ‘maternal conduct laws’, governing the way women comport themselves when pregnant; there are ‘fetal drug laws’ criminalizing the consumption of certain drugs, even legal ones like alcohol, by pregnant women.  Protecting the foetus from harm takes priority over the ‘carrier’, that is, the pregnant woman. Of course, there is considerable hypocrisy to this, since protection of foetuses is better achieved through improved healthcare and alleviating poverty. Similar to carceralism that has led to the widespread imprisonment and dehumanization of Black men, foetal protectionism (known in religious circles as ‘fetal salvation’) has overwhelmingly affected women of colour and poor women. This kind of nationalism is also part of a broader diminishing of women and their bodies since the bans construct men as autonomous bodies in the world, while women are construed as carriers of cells that might form a live foetus. The ‘pre-born’, as forced-maternity advocates regularly term it, take precedence over both pregnant and would-be-pregnant women.

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Forms of populism that have been fueled by ‘wound nationalism’ and the ‘culture wars’ are not inevitably reactionary. Populism can even serve inclusive and egalitarian ends, resisting authoritarian elites while demanding the inclusion of minoritized people. It can be counter-hegemonic and pluralistic precisely because ‘We the People’ is a site of active re-imaginings and construction.

I believe we should take inspiration from progressive activists of many kinds, operating throughout the globe today. Of particular importance are the insights, practices, and policies of minoritized activists struggling against multiple oppressions. Their ‘situated knowledges’, as philosopher Donna Haraway puts it, incite inventive ways of thinking about better worlds. Sociologist Chandra Talpade Mohanty maintains that, in developing both theoretical knowledge and revolutionary practices, marginalized communities possess an ‘epistemic advantage’ over more privileged ones. Of course, she is not making the naive claim that ‘all marginalized locations yield crucial knowledge about power and inequity.’ Rather, her point is that ‘the lives, experiences, and struggles of girls and women of the Two-Thirds World . . . demystify capitalism in its racial and sexual dimensions.’ This provides ‘productive and necessary avenues of theorizing and enacting capitalist resistance’. Haraway points out that subjugated peoples are more likely to see through the ‘god trick’ of universalism with all ‘its dazzling – and, therefore, blinding – illuminations’. She argues that ‘“subjugated” standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective transforming accounts of the world.’

Part of the reason why both Mohanty and Haraway demand that activists pay attention to the ‘situated knowledges’ of subjugated peoples is because they view all forms of tyranny (sexism, racism, colonialism, economic injustice, heteronormativity, transphobia, militarism, climate denial, able-ism, and neoliberal capitalisms, etc.) as interlinked. It will never be enough for activists to work along only one dimension of oppression – racism or misogyny, for example – because systems of domination are multi-layered and co-constituted.

If we are serious about effective resistance to ‘wound nationalism’, we need to make coalitions with the full and wide range of progressive activist movements. As I elaborate in my book Disgrace: A Global History of Sexual Violence, there are four basic tenets locality, diversity, pleasure and the body in resisting ‘wound nationalism’, the ‘culture wars’, and authoritarian versions of populism.

First, locality: any strategy of resistance must attend to local needs and engage the political labour of local activists. This will require paying attention to micro-practices of resistance against sexual violence – often carried out by minoritized people who lack access to prominent speaking platforms and the global media. Crucially, small, localized movements are not simply pockets of proto-resistance waiting to be noticed, developed and enhanced by one of the ‘authorized movements’: they are a vital component of the global movement to create better worlds.

Second, justice is not only locally relevant, but culturally variable. By necessity, effective initiatives will be diverse in terms of personnel and strategy. There is no singular template. The third tenet is the embrace of pleasure, or creativity. Activists are emboldened by art, literature, poetry, film, performance theatre and music. The poet Adrienne Rich has reflected on the importance of all forms of artistic expression, not as ‘a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering’ but as a form of ‘resistance, which totalising systems want to quell’.

Finally, activism is most effective when it is ‘hands on’. The bodily presence of other people – survivors who share their stories, for example – is formidable. This was the great power of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, and numerous other hashtags. They did not only exist online (indeed, elsewhere I have made the argument that, at least with #MeToo, their online version was weak, even apolitical, exchanging social exchange for individualized, isolated encounters in front of computer screens) but also on the streets. The presence of recalcitrant bodies linked together in solidarity has a subversive force that cannot be replaced by online assignations. This is why the toppling of statues and the renaming of buildings (as in the TCD library) are important. As philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, ‘a body is not just something we own, it is something we are.’ Bodies influence the way people think. Recalcitrant bodies spawn recalcitrant politics.

Finally, these tenets nestle within the over-arching concept of transversalism, with its promise of going beyond or passing through (the Latin root of ‘trans’) universalism. If we are to counter nationalisms of all kinds, we will need to harness the political, economic and cultural labour of all progressive groups. Transversalism starts from the basic belief that each person recognizes the world from their own position and that, as a consequence, all knowledge is partial and incomplete. Nira Yuval-Davis pleads for a shift from identity politics (‘who’ we are) to goal-orientated politics (‘what we want to achieve’). This shift does not require activists to repudiate their self-identities, but rather to acknowledge our situated knowledges while eagerly responding to the knowledges of others. In the words of feminist international legal scholar Hilary Charlesworth, transversalism ‘differs from universalism by allowing multiple points of departure rather than assuming that there is a universal bedrock of values in all societies’. In other words, transversalism draws attention to the fact that universalism is often nothing more than disguised ethnocentrism. The task of creating coalitions requires the acceptance of difference, predicated on a recognition of the grounded positionalities of participants, strategically united by the goal: of creating inclusive and just environments for all who inhabit a shared space. Intersectionality (which reminds us of difference) and transversalism (which provides ways of acting together while embracing difference) are powerful tools towards achieving a shared goal. Through contestation and coalition, a hitherto non-existent ‘we’ is called into being.

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To conclude: I began this talk by quoting from τhe preamble to the Constitution of the United States (1789), ‘We the People of the United States… do ordain and establish this Constitution’. Precisely because there is no pre-existing ‘People’ – they only come into being through processes of recitation and routine – Trump’s claim of ‘We My People’ has been remarkably effective in creating a shared discourse among a wide range of voters based on their perception of victimhood and thwarted entitlements. ‘Preoccupied with own suffering and sense of injury, ‘wound nationalists’ shift responsibility for the moral injury to outsiders – those who can be placed outside this iteration of ‘we the people’. Crucially, ‘wound nationalism’, as expressed by dominant group representatives (white evangelicals, men, and women), is based on very ‘felt’ anxieties. As I discuss in my book Fear: A Cultural History, the distinction between ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ is crucial. The word ‘fear’ is used to refer to an immediate, specific, objective threat while ‘anxiety’ refers to an anticipated, generalised, subjective threat, in which people are often uncertain about what endangers them. As Sigmund Freud (arguably the designer of the modern concept of anxiety) put it, ‘Anxiety relates to the condition and ignores the object, whereas in the word Fear attention is focussed on the object’. In ‘fear’, a frightening person or dangerous object can be (fairly accurately) identified, while in ‘anxiety’, there is a sense of being overwhelmed by more amorphous feelings of dread or premonitions of doom. 'Wound nationalism is fuelled by anxiety.

The ‘trauma’ of dominant group victims becomes both an enabling factor and explanatory tool. However, the narrative created by ‘wound nationalists’ proves no space for a ‘working through’, as trauma theorists call for. Quite the opposite: it is fetishized by becoming disconnected from ‘real’ injuries. The wounded identity circulates within a vicious circle, repeatedly inflicting collateral damage as well as damage to others. However, precisely because ‘wound nationalism’ is profoundly pathologizing, it is in need of political critique and healing.