Administrative Belongings: Race, Sexuality, and Capitalist Violence
In this talk, Reddy will focus on the unprecedented expansion of the administrative and bio-political powers of the U.S. state since the nineteen-sixties. The administration of social difference became, he argues, a crucial feature of the multicultural state, creating new sources for its authority and use of violence. By conjoining the institutionalization of “anti-racist” civil rights (through the Civil Rights Act of 1964) with a seismic expansion of state administrative powers into domains such as housing, health, education, and municipality for their “enforcement,” administrative power became the secret fulcrum by which the multicultural welfare state gathered for itself new powers to control, dominate, and internally differentiate populations of “fully” enfranchised citizens, creating new conditions for the power over life and death and the management of racial capitalist inequalities. Yet, queer indigenous and queer of color activisms offer the keenest critique of this rights-based administrative order, and its death-dealing powers, creating forms of relationality that are unimaginable within and antagonistic to the norms of the rights-based political state and the capitalist social relations it violently enforces.
Chandan Reddy is associate professor of English and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, and is the author of Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State.
This program is presented in partnership with the Laspa Center for Leadership.