Practices of Belonging: Speech, Citizenship, and the Struggle for the Sovereign Self

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Refusing to Listen: Receptive Audiences & the Political Authority of Speech in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill. Hank Owings (Political Science, Penn)

THE POPULARITY OF THE TERM “CANCEL CULTURE” gestures toward the popularity of free speech culture in the United States. And yet, “to cancel” refers only to a certain subset of speech: the pejorative invocation of “cancel” is meant to identify and constrain attempts to impute harm to speech. In other words, attacking “cancel culture” is a defense of one’s ability to say anything with impudence, burdening the consequences of speech exclusively on the listener. HANK OWINGS returns to early modern political theory and canonical liberal texts in order to demonstrate that this understanding of speech is present from the very beginnings of Western liberalism. Working through the ways Hobbes, Locke, and Mill understand both freedom and speech, he identifies how “freedom of speech” is always a unidirectional freedom from speakers to listeners. For Hobbes and Locke, those without or with less political authority or obligated to passively listen to speech from those with authority. For Mill, every member of society bears a heavier burden of actively listening to most speech, even that which might be construed as harmful. Absent in this account and lacking in canonical political theory is a robust tradition of refusing to listen. “Cancel culture,” then, is simply confirming this assumption inherent in the liberal tradition: that those with traditional authority are entitled to an audience, and that audience is not allowed to stifle speech or refuse to listen. 

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“Authentic” Transgender Citizenship: Legality and Diagnostic Practices of Gender Dysphoria in Pakistan. Uzma Sher Zafar (Anthropology, University of Virginia)

SINCE THE INTRODUCTION OF THE TRANSGENDER PERSONS (PROTECTION OF RIGHTS) ACT 2018, trans people in Pakistan can access citizenship under the category of khwaja sira(transwoman), khwaja sira (transman) and khunsa-i-mushkil (intersex or hermaphrodite persons). In this context, UZMA SHER ZAFAR explores emergent meanings of gender dysphoria in medical consultations between transgender people and medical practitioners.  An inclusive definition of gender variant citizenship has initiated narratives around “authentic” trans bodies and who is genuinely khwaja sira. The deployment of biomedical models to investigate the authenticity of trans experience has orchestrated complexities of care at the intersection of dysphoric experience, citizenship and gender affirming psychiatric care as the gateway to gender affirming surgical care. Under the new law, doctors have become accessories of state bureaucracy as assessors of legitimate citizenship claims. This includes Sunni Muslim psychiatrists with strong beliefs in “Nature” and the “natural” body as unalterably Allah-given. Zafar analyzes medical encounters between doctors and those seeking psychiatric certifications of gender dysphoria in the pursuit of eligibility for citizenship documents and explores the ethical negotiations that make gender affirming medical care possible for their trans patients. In the process, Zafar traces a socially conscious reconfiguration of Sunni Muslim ideas on gender dysphoria and the “natural” body. What are the questions asked of dysphoric patients to medically “prove” their dysphoria? How is gender dysphoric experience visibilized in a psychiatric setting to qualify the trans body for citizenship? How does the sociality of the medical encounter make space for proving or denying gender dysphoria as genuine psychic suffering? Zafar looks at the varied ways in which doctor-patient interactions become a place of evidence production to satisfy state legislative demands of citizen psychology.