Abstract
Reviewed by: Kim Allen, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Revolting Subjects is a compelling and timely book, presenting a thick social and cultural account of neoliberalism as a form of governance. Tyler draws on the work of feminist and post-colonial writers in developing a rich psychosocial account of neoliberal forms of citizenship, sovereignty and subjectivity. Tyler argues that, while in many ways productive, Kristeva’s paradigm of abjection is problematic in failing to engage with the consequence of being made abject (see Tyler, 2009a). She argues, not for abandoning the concept of abjection entirely, but rather for ‘pris[ing] it out of the theoretical and political frames in which it is positioned’ (p. 13).
In a rich theoretical first chapter, Tyler draws on work by Bataille, Butler, Spivak and Fanon to make a case for a more socially and historically located theory of ‘social abjection’ as a mode of governmentality and process by which ‘minoritised populations are imagined and configured as revolting and become subject to control, stigma and censure’ (pp. 3–4). She attends to the embodied experiences of being made abject – or in Butler’s terms, ‘the violence of classification as forms of mattering’ (p. 36) – as well as the ways in which this is contested. Tyler deploys what she calls a ‘figurative methodology’ to track the repetition of abject ‘revolting’ figures – those designated as failed citizens such as ‘chavs’, ‘riotous youth’, Gypsies and asylum seekers – across a range of sites. Enmeshed within the ‘interpellative fabric of everyday life’ (p. 11) these ‘ideological conductors’ operate to garner public consent for punitive policies of neoliberal capitalism. Through her empirical examples or ‘political parables’ (p. 18), Tyler creatively weaves together interview data, field notes, news articles, policy and legal texts and academic research to examine the processes of being symbolically and materially ‘cast out’.
While the book has many compelling aspects for readers of Feminist Theory, there are at least two further contributions the book makes which will be of particular interest. First, in the analysis of empirical examples, Revolting Subjects reveals the central place of gender within processes of neoliberal governmentality – building on Tyler’s previous work on the maternal (Tyler, 2009a, 2009b) and on the classificatory struggles played out through the figure of the ‘chav mum’ (Tyler, 2008; Tyler and Bennett, 2010). In Chapter 2, ‘The abject politics of British citizenship’, she traces historically the legal and cultural production of British citizenship as a field of intelligibility. Tyler draws attention to how the pregnant bodies of migrant women are used as corporeal border zones in the constitution of the neo-colonial, neoliberal nation state.
Tyler continues this concern with the maternal in Chapter 4 on ‘Naked protest: maternal politics and the feminist commons’. Here Tyler ‘restages’ two events to consider the gendered practices of resistance to neoliberal capitalism – the naked protests by mothers at the Yarl’s Wood detention centre and by indigenous mothers in the Niger Delta against global oil corporations. Responding to Federici’s call for women to mobilise their bodies collectively to ‘take back space’, Tyler considers how maternal figures – through their insistence on the acknowledgement of maternal origins (p. 123) – can collectively trouble dominant notions of citizenship, value and the public sphere. The ideas of feminist communing and maternal protest have potential beyond Tyler’s empirical examples. Tyler’s concern with the troubling potential of the maternal has been pivotal to my own work and should be taken up as we think about the relationship between gender, reproduction, citizenship and feminist politics. Tyler’s distinctly feminist analysis provides an important intervention into debates about resistance, troubling masculinist approaches which too often neglect the unequal gendered effects of neoliberalism and downplay forms of protest taken up by women.
While theoretically sophisticated, this is a highly accessible book. The influence of cultural studies is apparent not just in Tyler’s concern with the mediation of inequality, but also in the evocative style of her writing as she brings her account of social abjection to life through stories of those made abject. What emerges is a book that, despite being about dehumanisation, is a profoundly visceral read. While presenting the reader with harrowing stories of the violent stripping of subjects of their human dignity, Revolting Subjects is in fact full of the kind of political hope and imagination required to help us think differently about the current moment. Revolting Subjects is profoundly political: Tyler refuses to end with a critique of the problems of the present – the material and symbolic effects of processes of marginalisation. Indeed, a major strength of Tyler’s analysis is her consideration of the ways in which individuals made abject can and do resist and interrupt these processes by refusing their constitution as ‘abject’ – even if such resistance is suppressed or misrecognised.
This book is an important and timely resource for scholars and students in a range of disciplines and fields including sociology, politics, media and cultural studies and philosophy. Tyler has rightly emerged as one of the most provocative, impassioned and engaging voices in contemporary debates about neoliberalism, stigmatisation and inequality. In illuminating both the processes of social abjection and concrete instances of revolting against these, Revolting Subjects delivers not just a powerful critique of neoliberal Britain but also a rousing call to arms.