‘This is not who we are’: Gendered bordering practices, ontological insecurity, and lines of continuity under the Trump presidency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christine Agius

Abstract The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised a return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.

Author(s):  
Carmina Yu Untalan

Abstract This article advances a critical outlook on dominant interpretations of ontological security in international relations. It suggests that the preoccupation with state- and identity-centric analyses diminishes the value of the Other to an archetype of ontological insecurity and a source of ontological insecurity for the Self. It argues that seeing ontological security from the postcolonial perspective expands the self-referential understanding of ontological security to a Self-Other relation of mutual coexistence. To do so, the article proposes a framework that loosely intersects Giddens’ work on late modernity with postcolonial notions of interstitiality and hybridity. Postcolonial ontological security foregrounds the emergence of a “third hybrid Other” from an ontologically insecure status through three interrelated conditions of reflexivity, resourcefulness, and resistance. It aims to shed light on creative, nondestructive ways of confronting ontological insecurity and to encourage a view of the postcolonial Other as a learning source for the Self. These arguments are illustrated with the case of Okinawan “Otherness” vis-à-vis the US and Japanese selves, with particular attention to antimilitary base movements.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592110179
Author(s):  
Mariana Souto-Manning

Belonging matters in early childhood. Despite its importance, the majoritarian conceptualization of belonging is seldom problematized. In the US, the politics of belonging draws racialized lines of inclusion and exclusion, (re)inscribing longstanding racialized systems of inequity and injustice. Through critical race and Latina feminist perspectives and methodologies, an immigrant mother and son of Color examined their lived experiences. Findings unveil the urgency of upending formal racialized notions of belonging—for example, citizenship, co-naturalized with whiteness. Attending to the palpable consequences of ideological and relational borders that exclude and subjugate immigrants of Color, implications call for abolishing belonging as property and cultivating collective healing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1358
Author(s):  
Michael R. Greenberg

From 1850 through approximately 1920, wealthy entrepreneurs and elected officials created “grand avenues” lined by mansions in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and other developing US cities. This paper examines the birthplaces of grand avenues to determine whether they have remained sustainable as magnets for healthy and wealthy people. Using data from the US EPA’s EJSCREEN system and the CDC’s 500 cities study across 11 cities, the research finds that almost every place where a grand avenue began has healthier and wealthier people than their host cities. Ward Parkway in Kansas City and New York’s Fifth Avenue have continued to be grand. Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., Richmond’s Monument Avenue, St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard are national and regional symbols of political power, culture and entertainment, leading to sustainable urban grand avenues, albeit several are challenged by their identification with white supremacy. Among Midwest industrial cities, Chicago’s Prairie Avenue birthplace has been the most successful, whereas the grand avenues of St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo have struggled, trying to use higher education, medical care, and entertainment to try to rebirth their once pre-eminent roles in their cities.


Author(s):  
Esme Choonara

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 in the context of a COVID-19 pandemic that was already disproportionally impacting on the lives of people from black, Asian and other minority ethnicities in the UK and the US has provoked scrutiny of how racism impacts on all areas of our lives. This article will examine some competing theories of racism, and ask what theoretical tools we need to successfully confront racism in health and social care. In particular, it will scrutinise the different levels at which racism operates – individual, institutional and structural – and ask how these are related. Furthermore, it will argue against theories that see racism as a product of whiteness per se or ‘white supremacy’, insisting instead that racism should be understood as firmly bound to the functioning and perpetuation of capitalism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 105477382110561
Author(s):  
Onome Henry Osokpo ◽  
Lisa M. Lewis ◽  
Uchechukwu Ikeaba ◽  
Jesse Chittams ◽  
Frances K. Barg ◽  
...  

This cross-sectional study aims to describe the self-care of adult African immigrants in the US with chronic illness and explore the relationship between acculturation and self-care. A total of 88 African immigrants with chronic illness were enrolled. Self-care was measured with the Self Care of Chronic Illness Inventory v3 and the Self-Care Self-Efficacy scale. Scores are standardized 0 to 100 with scores >70 considered adequate. Acculturation was measured using a modified standardized acculturation instrument and predefined acculturation proxies. The self-care scores showed adequate self-care, with the mean scores of 78.6, 77.9, and 75.6 for self-care maintenance, monitoring, and management. Self-care self-efficacy mean score was 81.3. Acculturation was not significantly associated with self-care. Self-care self-efficacy was a strong determinant of self-care maintenance ( p < .0001), monitoring ( p < .0001), and management ( p < .0001). The perception of inadequate income was a significant determinant of poor self-care management ( p = .03). Self-care self-efficacy and perceived income adequacy were better determinants of self-care than acculturation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (6) ◽  
pp. 1167-1187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Simi ◽  
Kathleen Blee ◽  
Matthew DeMichele ◽  
Steven Windisch

The process of leaving deeply meaningful and embodied identities can be experienced as a struggle against addiction, with continuing cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses that are involuntary, unwanted, and triggered by environmental factors. Using data derived from a unique set of in-depth life history interviews with 89 former U.S. white supremacists, as well as theories derived from recent advances in cognitive sociology, we examine how a rejected identity can persist despite a desire to change. Disengagement from white supremacy is characterized by substantial lingering effects that subjects describe as addiction. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of identity residual for understanding how people leave and for theories of the self.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS GRANT

This article examines the border-crossing journalism of the Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Tom Le

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has not only changed how the USA engages in warfare but also how it maintains its military supremacy and how other nations budget and strategize. The very idea of the RMA has impacted how nations manage their technological advantages and raises the questions of can the RMA be monopolized and if not, which nations can adopt their own RMA? In September 2000, the Japan Defence Agency (now the Ministry of Defence [MOD]) produced a report titled ‘“Info-RMA”: Study on Info-RMA and the Future of the Self-Defence Forces’ to explore the prospects of implementing RMA principles in the Japan Self-Defence Forces. In this article, I explore to what extent can RMA principles be implemented in the Self-Defence Forces? I argue that although several significant changes have been implemented in technology, doctrine, operations and organization, various normative and technical constraints have directed the MOD to craft an RMA with Japanese characteristics, emphasizing defence and interconnectedness with the US armed forces. These findings suggest that current efforts to ‘normalize’ the Self-Defence Forces can succeed if crafted to appeal to the sensibilities of the Japanese public.


Author(s):  
Michael O. West

It is a truism that black folk in the United States are an international people. From the beginning of the republic, they were compelled by force of domestic (national) circumstances to internationalize their struggle for liberation, the founders having excluded them from the US social contract. The initial affidavit of exclusion is right there in the inaugural document of the social contract, the Declaration of Independence, which, ever so cryptically, damned the king of England for having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” This was an attack on the self-emancipatory activities of the enslaved descendants of Africa, who were exploiting the chaos caused by the anticolonial rebellion to claim their freedom, sometimes in cahoots with the British colonialists. Unable or unwilling to confront their own contradictions, the authors of the Declaration of Independence condemned the self-determination of the slaves as the doing of outside agitators, a charge that would be hurled at African American movements and activists for generations to come—up to the present time, in fact....


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