Suchergebnisse

The truth-telling in his piece is sin quo non to the unmasking needed to forge pathways to new gendered possibilities in troubled times toward transformative futures. I explore the affective embodied experience of living as a non-binary transmasculine person in a binary world. Drawing on the work of Jack Halberstam, Tami Spry, and Bryant Keith Alexander, this essay (and performance) is shared with/through my testosterone-lowered voice, my masculine-appearing body, and my non-binary orientations that ask the world to avoid the pitfalls of binarized gender relations. Performance autoethnography has long held space in the academy for the foregrounding of non-majoritarian lived experience through affective, interpersonal, and embodied strategies, and this piece builds on those traditions.

In this paper I argue that in Richard Rorty's pragmatism we find a view of political progress at once at home in Nietzsche's thought and in the Enlightenment tradition. If we think of progress as indexed to some permanent standard, and then agree that it is Nietzsche who dispels the authority of any such standard, then we may perhaps conclude that after Nietzsche, progress is ruled out. I want to show, however, that we find in Nietzsche comfort for a continued vision of human progress through engaged political action. I suggest that we look to Jacques Derrida and Rorty as offering a vision of a post-Nietzschean democracy the engine of which is what I call a progress without end.