Abstract
These two volumes, one a monograph and the other an edited collection, couldn’t approach politics more differently even as they share a concern with those from historically marginalized populations. Davina Cooper, in Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority, examines situations in which religious views are pitted against civil rights ordinances in an effort to find out what one can learn about the nature of the state. More specifically, Cooper reviews cases in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom where conservative Christians object to providing a service to gay individuals or couples, and the corresponding actions of government councils and courts in implementing civil rights laws, in order to “conceptually [reimagine] what it means to be a state” (p. 2, emphasis in original). The papers published under Lori Montalbano’s direction in Gender, Race, and Social Identity in American Politics: The Past and Future of Political Access, on the contrary, direct their attention to the more prosaic, and realistic, task of reviewing specific instances and events of political life in the United States to evaluate the prospects for greater political access for those of color (and from minority ethnic groups), for those who are female, and for those who possess a marginalized or stigmatized social identity.
Cooper’s Feeling Like a State is an intriguing, challenging, and ambitious volume. Cooper defines her task and goal succinctly in her introduction: “I want to use the language of statehood to think toward public political governance formations as responsible, activist, and caring; governing in ways that are horizontal, engaged, playful and sensory” (p. 3). She elaborates by stating that she wishes to think about the possibility of the state in “progressive hopeful ways” (p. 3), defining these as imagining the state in terms of greater social equality with respect to power, resources, and freedoms between, within, and beyond existing social spaces; as ways of living more collaboratively and less competitively; and through methods of supporting ecological welfare between people, animals, forms of vegetative life, and landscapes. As she states throughout the book, she wishes to reimagine what the state can be with an eye toward conceptualizing it as a positive influence on men, women, humanity, and the planet.
In order to achieve this ambitious project, Cooper examines those cases in which conservative Christians have withdrawn goods, services, or membership from gay individuals on religious grounds and, in response, public bodies have withdrawn “contracts, employment grants, and subsidies” from the conservative Christians. She adopts this method because she believes “the politics of withdrawal” makes it possible to step away and “reimagine what it could mean to be a state” (p. 4), thereby acknowledging that the modern state is plural and contested. In essence, Cooper is asking us to think about how the state might be reformed by different “cuts,” leading to new framings, combinations, and separations as a better means of assembling a truly progressive, transformative conception of the state. Her effort, as such, is admittedly exploratory; she ultimately hopes to envision a state whose authority is moored in responsibility for human welfare, one that does not compromise itself in acts of environmental degradation to maintain an artificial standard of living nor depend on oppressive means of domination, including violence and war.
Initially, it is important to acknowledge that Cooper has a command of the literature on gay rights and gay equality (in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) as well as a thorough command of the literature on the evolution and nature of the state. This permits Cooper to move back and forth between a discussion of the legal cases that involve conservative Christians’ disavowal and withdrawal (of recognition, of services, from extending already established rights) to abstract discussions of the nature of governing and the essential elements of statehood.
Cooper begins by examining the question of why it is necessary, or even advisable, to hold on to the historical notion of the state. She notes that many on the left reject the state as historically oppressive and as having little utility (or potential) for embracing a truly progressive form for future governance. Thus, some have argued that the nation-state concept is excessively general, idealized, and increasingly ineffectual in light of other advanced forms and techniques of “contemporary rule and identification” (p. 19). Perhaps most importantly, critics of the nation-state argue that it has been (and often continues to be) the core mechanism for reproducing dominant, centralized, elitist economic relations as well as inequitable racialized, gendered, sexual, and geopolitical relations. Why tether one’s hopes for a transformative, progressive politics on the notion of the state? Cooper’s answer, somewhat belabored but ultimately sensible, is that the state constitutes a focus of attachment, concern, and interest throughout the world as well as a principal organizing source of regulatory control. In short, it is impractical at present to abandon the idea of the nation-state, but Cooper argues it is possible to avoid treating the state in a way that maintains a state versus non-state binary boundary. Rather, the state should be conceived of as an orienting, as opposed to defining, label so that its purpose and methods can be reimagined.
Unfortunately, Cooper then enters a dense maze of somewhat jargony, abstruse discussions of how the process of reimagining the state might proceed. She identifies four primary moves as requisite: “foregrounding the heterogeneous composition of state formations; pluralizing state imaginations; exploring play as a register of governing; and resituating desire and the erotic within state action” (p. 24). A chapter is dedicated to each of these processes in turn.
“Foregrounding the heterogeneous composition of state formations” turns out to be a meandering, ultimately tautological discursive restatement of a few propositions that is, in the end, unenlightening. The problem begins with an initial reformulation of the purpose and goal such that the chapter is retitled “Retrieving Dissident State Parts.” Cooper’s argument seems to be that historically influential conceptions of the state do not take into account “street-level actors, dissident beliefs and commitments, and the users and many places where public provision and regulation are experienced and felt” (p. 61). She posits that these fleeting, dissident elements are important because otherwise the presence, capacity, and effects of minority and oppositional forces will not be acknowledged as the constitutive features of the state that they actually embody. Here, one might note that Cooper is perfectly willing to ease the boundary between what heretofore might have been viewed as the difference between “state” and “society.” Cooper is intent on embracing ambiguity and introducing disparate and novel features wherever there is the least glimmer of hope that such actions will be “fruitful in thinking about the place of antihegemonic state action” (p. 61). To her credit, she admits that “[T]reating the state as simply the improvised or endlessly distributed effect of loosely networked governance relations is not enough” (p. 70). Regrettably, while Cooper is good at deconstructing, she is less adept at reconstructing anew. At the end of the chapter all she can offer are empty generalizations (e.g., “Gathered states touch everyone in some way” [p. 73]) and pacifying bromides that reassure her she is on the right track (“identifying the reach of gathered states, and what they inhere in, matters” [p. 73]).
Subsequent chapters exhibit some of the same shortcomings. In discussing the plural nature of the state, Cooper wants to examine “what becomes thinkable once we dislodge the conceptual primacy of nation-states” (p. 101). By the plural nature of the state, Cooper simply refers to the presence of multiple, overlapping, differently scaled authorities within the state domain. She begins by noting that formations other than nation-states can “look like” or “act like” states, thus appearing to be “state-like.” This can happen even where the vertical state structure endures simply because the overlapping presence of multiple, differently scaled authorities is already built into that modern configuration. Moreover, what Cooper calls “processes of state enactment” (i.e., new rules, new laws, or new case rulings) mean that elements of the state are constantly forged and revised.
Cooper’s goal is to go beyond this conception of a multi-layer, multi-jurisdictional state to further “unsettle” “both horizontal and vertical imaginaries of orderly political power” (p. 84). That is, it is not enough in her view for there to exist subordinate sources of law or authority when those entities must depend on acquiring superordinate permission from the higher-ups in the nation-state to act. Rather, Cooper seeks what has been called a “strong legal pluralism” where there exists no agreed-upon basis for determining the respective authority between essentially competing bodies. In this regard, she wishes to at least think about the implications of a state formation where (just about) everything may be contested. She does so in order to erect an idea of a state where the nation-state’s capacity to control and overpower those entities that are less powerful proves less totalizing. This leads her to seek recognition that “gathered states,” which pose as fully formed, are rather more evolving than static. Indeed, she asks the reader to acknowledge that a state’s incapacity to govern may be a more or less direct result of the static state’s inability to understand how its “touch” upon its citizens is being experienced. Yet in the end, Cooper’s theorizing of the “felt” state does not offer much illumination since she admits, reluctantly, that extreme plural states may prove counterproductive given the world’s power relations that face modern nation-states.
Cooper’s discussion of state play is perhaps her least persuasive. Acknowledging that historically states “do not tend to play kindly,” Cooper tries her damnedest to further her argument that, if adopted, play in the form of expectations or desire for pleasure through challenge and confirmation could help bring about a progressive, transformative politics. While she offers a number of examples (such as “free-running” the state just as one “free-runs” the urban landscape), Cooper’s efforts pall and fail when one tries to consider Benjamin Netanyahu free-running anything other than roughshod over Palestinians’ rights.
Likewise, Cooper’s invitation to consider how the erotic can help one think about states falters. Without attempting to elaborate each proposition Cooper offers here, her argument relies on the sensory benefits of truly participatory democracy as similar to the erotic in that neither is principally directed at the outcome but rather both are oriented to the process of engagement, of taking part. In essence, she argues that everyday political encounters can thus become “exciting, energizing, and vital” (p. 151). Writing in early 2020, one can respond either that political encounters already are exciting and vital for Trump supporters at a Trump rally or, alternatively, that the likelihood of a “transformative, progressive, erotic” impeachment trial of President Trump in the U.S. Senate appears nil. While one can easily agree with Cooper that everyday politics would probably be better if the interactions more nearly resembled children’s play, her book does far too little to construct a pathway to such an idealized vision for nation-states. Ultimately, Cooper’s effort is a failed experiment.
Montalbano’s edited volume on gender, race, and social identity in American politics, at just short of three hundred pages, poses the perennial problem of fairly reviewing fifteen scholarly essays in a thousand words. The best one can do is offer the reader a brief overview and then several snapshots of individual papers. The essays summarized below are representative of the collection, neither the best nor the worst chapters in the volume.
Montalbano and all of her contributors, with only one or two exceptions, are academics from the fields of communications and rhetoric. Fourteen of the nineteen contributors are women, by my count, which seems entirely appropriate for a volume that is centrally concerned with the impact of gender, race, and social identity in American politics. The chapters focus on events, themes, and trends that permeated the 2016 elections. Thus, it is a volume that principally addresses contemporary American politics with only the short, occasional backward glance at our political culture.
Montalbano identifies three discrete sections to the volume. Papers in the first section are described in the introduction as investigating the intersections of gender, sexuality, and misogyny as those features play out in social media. In the second section, the focus shifts slightly according to the description, embracing important events or trends that accentuate the connections of race, ethnicity, and religious ideologies in American politics. In the final section, papers are described as addressing social media, politics, and the creation of social identity. In truth, of course, gender, race, and identity, which are inevitably bound together to create a self, are all present throughout most of the papers so that the distinctions defining the three sections are rather artificial.
In “(Re)establishing Presidential Identity: Women Candidates and the Gender Issue,” Jonathan Smith and Antonio de Velasco reexamine the uphill challenge that women have historically faced in American politics to prove themselves “presidential.” As the authors note, women have generally been treated as unnatural in politics, which is traditionally viewed as a “man’s game.” Thus women face higher expectations in order to demonstrate their capability. To investigate this process, the authors focus on campaign announcement speeches because they are one of the principal vehicles candidates use to construct their identity for their proclaimed candidacy. Candidates, of course, each have a complex history that involves prior academic, social, and often political achievements as well as established, preexisting relationships. The announcement that a person is seeking elected office offers the opportunity for a candidate to proclaim, and attempt to establish, an identity specifically drawn to highlight his or her suitability for the office sought. The authors examine the announcement speeches of the three most successful women to have sought the presidency: Margaret Chase Smith (in 1964); Shirley Chisholm (1972); and Hillary Clinton (2008; 2016). In each case, the authors observe that overcoming the “double bind” that requires women to display both masculine-seeming competency and more traditional femininity is a shared dilemma. In the end, the authors conclude that the myth of the post-feminist era hinders women candidates because it deludes the public into believing that women have overcome the bias against them in American politics when, indeed, they have not.
The authors identify four themes in Margaret Chase Smith’s announcement for her 1964 run for president. First, Smith ties her candidacy to furthering the perceived history of American progress in overcoming discrimination, thereby linking her story with the story of life improving for all Americans. Second, Smith clarifies and reasserts her political identity as a moderate, albeit one attacked by extremists from both sides. Third, Smith lays out her credentials as a desirable, experienced candidate. Finally, she asserts her “challenging spirit,” characterizing her quest as one more test and highlighting her desire to overcome barriers, including that of her gender, and thereby “prove people [who doubt her viability] wrong” (p. 83).
Chisholm also offers four themes in her announcement speech. As a black woman, Chisholm argues that prejudice will not hold her back and expresses the view that there has been enough progress that the majority of Americans will not hold any bias against her. Chisholm identifies herself as favoring environmental protection, expresses concern about reforming campaign funding laws, and supports peaceful change for what she states is a “divided nation.” This leads Chisholm to base her candidacy on a call for new leadership, arguing in favor of her capability as a leader to overcome suspicion that neither an African American nor a woman can be president. Finally, Smith and Velasco note that, like Smith, Chisholm works to characterize her candidacy as revolutionary and activist, aimed at overcoming any perceived weaknesses from her identity as a black woman.
Clinton, of course, had two runs for president. In both runs, Smith and Velasco find that Clinton’s announcement speeches focused less on her gender than those of either Smith or Chisholm. In her 2008 run Clinton focused heavily on her personal background as middle class and as an advocate for the American Dream. She presented herself as not merely running for political office but “beginning a conversation” with the American people that would lead to “[getting] our country back on track” (p. 85). In the 2016 campaign, these latter emphases were reoriented slightly to highlight the divide between ordinary Americans and “those at the top.” Clinton argued that “when families are strong, America is strong.” She states in this speech that the American Dream is best achieved by strengthening families and suggests she is the leader of choice because of her advocacy for, and connection to, everyday Americans. In both election years, Clinton concentrated on identifying her policy positions while ignoring her gender. Ultimately, the authors wonder whether Clinton’s strategy to downplay her gender made her candidacy less successful than it would have been had she asserted gender as a hurdle to overcome.
In “Trump and Clinton Tropes: Social Mediated Communication in the Net Age,” Rochelle Robertson examines the two candidates’ use of emojis through the lens of Kenneth Burke’s theory of symbolic communication. Robertson notes that Burke believed people are threatened by differences; hence, people try to overcome any sense of difference that creates estrangement and look for common ground, thereby achieving “identification.” Since this is a continual process, and an imperfect one, an important strategy of the search for conformity that will lead to recognition of a shared identity is the regular reliance on scapegoats. In Burke’s estimation, by naming and blaming those who are perceived as “other” and thus guilty (of disturbing difference), “rightness” will be reestablished. Commonly, those who wish to communicate will choose recognizable symbolic language to draw their listeners closer rather than adopting dissociative language that will divide. A communicator like Donald Trump, though, can use a foil such as the New York Times to stand for everything that needs to be changed. By lambasting the Times, Trump draws his followers closer even as he divides a wider audience.
Trump and Clinton’s use of emojis, according to Robertson, closely followed their styles of communication. Trump, for example, often used the “raised fist” emoji (among others), which conveyed to many commentators an authoritative, powerful, and racially driven meaning. Overall, Trump used emojis like the raised fist that were widely viewed as assertive, aggressive, masculine, and often divisive, both before and after his election to the presidency. Clinton, to the contrary, favored emojis that included smiles and stars, offering a vastly different message and image, one that was collaborative and inviting. As Robertson notes, the selection of emojis appeared highly gendered and closely tied to each candidate's core self-conception. Robertson concludes that given the traditional bias against women in politics, Trump’s “raised fist” emoji may have helped him establish his image as “presidential.”
These two volumes take divergent views of national political systems. Cooper is intent on exploring the transformative potential of the state for engaging in progressive activism. She wishes to envision what it means to be a state to determine whether the state can become a vehicle for nurture, play, support, and pleasure rather than an instrument of power, domination, and sexual violence. Montalbano’s edited volume accepts the limitations of the American political governance system as presently conceived. The various articles assess current, and potential, strategies and opportunities for women, members of minority races and ethnic groups, and “different” social identities to gain access to positions of power and influence within the existing arrangements. Taken together, each volume in its own way speaks to dissatisfaction with the existing conception of the nation-state and, more particularly, the United States’ failure to achieve the legal equality of opportunity that America has always promised.