“Mind Your Own Damn Business!”? Liberal Attempts to Moderate Gender Identity Politics and their Backlashes

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14. Law, Activism, and Institutional Politics

Abstract

Why are the politics surrounding gender categories and identities so volatile (especially, but not only, in the U.S.) these days? Aren’t these questions ones in which we could relatively easily follow Tim Walz’s “mind your own damn business” dictum and focus our polarized polarizing energies on more pressing problems? Many scholars have puzzled over the question of the outsized role of gender categories and identities in contemporary American politics, questions that are often formulated in terms of “moral panic,” such that the question already suggests its answer. Without discounting the morally panicked character of American gender politics, this paper tacks in a different direction. It draws inspiration from the opening pages of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to suggest that the contentious politics around identities and categories of gender are a “problem of representation,” and a rather problematic one at that. Liberal modes of managing ethical diversity, which emerged out of 17th c European attempts to end otherwise endless religious civil warfare, play a preponderant role in conditioning, channeling the possibilities, limits, and stakes of problems of representation across the North Atlantic; and the paper briefly revisits the founding liberal principles of distinction and separation, as Hobbes and Locke, two important founding fathers of liberal thought, theorize them in the context of 17th c English civil war. The paper then turns to high-profile U.S. court cases, which raise questions about how to negotiate ethical diversity and social discord around categories of gender in primary school education. The paper’s principal aim is to comparatively consider the civic/conscience, public/private, moral/ontological distinctions that Hobbes and Locke draw in the context of religious civil war as they apply, with obvious differences but also surprising resonances, to liberal attempts to manage ethical diversity and social discord around gender categories in contemporary U.S.

Author

• Graham Wilson Hill, University of Bern