Full Description
Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power.
Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Başak ErtÜr, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, NÜkhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis
Contents
Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction / Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay 1
1. Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance / Judith Butler 12
2. Risking Oneself and One's Identity: Agonism Revisited / Zeynep Gambetti 28
3. Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience / Sarah Bracke 52
4. Vulnerable Times / Marianne Hirsch 76
5. Barricades: Resources and Residues of Resistance / Başak ErtÜr 97
6. Dreams and the Political Subject / Elena Loizidou 122
7. Vulnerable Corporealities and Precarious Belongings in Mona Hatoum's Art / Elena Tzelepis 146
8. Precarious Politics: The Activism of "Bodies That Count" (Aligning with Those That Don't) in Palestine's Colonial Frontier / Rema Hammami 167
9. When Antigone Is a Man: Feminist "Trouble" in the Late Colony / NÜkhet Sirman 191
10. Violence against Women in Turkey: Vulnerability, Sexuality, and Eros / Meltem Ahiska 211
11. Bare Subjectivity: Faces, Veils, and Masks in the Contemporary Allegories of Western Citizenship / Elsa Dorlin 236
12. Nonsovereign Agonism (or, Beyond Affirmation versus Vulnerability) / Athena Athanasiou 256
13. Permeable Bodies: Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony / Leticia Sabsay 278
Bibliography 303
Contributors 325
Index 329
