This is the final copyedited version of "Theorizing the

Subject" published in Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature.

Oxford University Press. Article published April 2020. doi: Formatted: Centered

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1132

Theorizing the Subject

Sidonie Smith

Summary

Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question “What is man?,” inquiries

into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and Deleted: Nineteenth

weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes’s cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for Deleted: Twentieth

an ontology of the idealist subject’s rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious

questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions,

the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th

and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases Deleted: Twentieth

of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false

consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued

explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its

relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a

gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault

and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, Deleted: racialized, and

energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist

theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as Deleted: Twenty-first

individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through

which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for

understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy,

slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st
century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and

distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality,

algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject

referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego,

interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to

define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality,

agency, identity, and embodiment.

Keywords Commented [L1]: AU: Please limit keywords to 10

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subject, person, interiority, ego, self, subjectivity, relationality, agency, identity, embodiment Deleted: human,
Deleted: personal identity,
What am I referring to when I say “I”? . . . . This concern with the self, with our Deleted: subjection,
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subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it
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come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can Deleted: ’

approach an understanding of the self?

Nick Mansfield1

The drive to comprehend defining features of “subject” and to advance large claims about its

ontology, or its capture in the nets of discipline, or the nature of its boundedness and

psychodynamic processes, or its historical specificity, seems insatiable. Scholars in philosophy,

psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory, sociology, history, and many

humanities disciplines proffer heterogeneous, competing, and contentious definitions in pursuit

of a, if not the, “truth” of the subject, delivered through theoretical dazzle and dense prose. Every

theory of the subject spurs vigorous critique of its inadequacies in accounting for certain

conditions, of the subject’s emergence, its bodily habitation, its fantasmatic proportions, and its

relations in and with the world external to it. Or it prompts critique of universalizing frameworks
that fail to differentiate between particular kinds of subjects, and to question what kind of subject

and whose subjectivity it encompasses. Each theory of the subject captures certain aspects of the

human condition; and each remains unsatisfactory at best, or flawed in its exclusivity at worst,

depending on its explanatory power. Registrants of dissatisfaction then attach adjectives to the

word “subject” or spin suggestive metaphors for subjectivity with the aim of stimulating

alternative ways of thinking about the subject.

An encyclopedia essay cannot do justice to the vast array of understandings of the human

subject in heterogeneous cultures around the globe, nor can it encompass the long histories of Deleted: ;

debates about the subject. In the West alone, the history of systematic contemplation of the

question “What is man?” extends back to classical Greek philosophers. This inquiry pursues the

concept of subject by means of three distinct but complementary moves. It teases out the uses of Deleted: complimentary

definitional terms invoked in disciplinary and everyday engagements with the term “subject.” It

maps out a history of theories of the subject in the West, beginning with the last half of the 18th Deleted: Eighteenth

century. It elaborates four constitutive components invoked in contemporary theorizing of

subject and subjectivity: relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.

Discerning Concepts: Human, Person, Interiority and

Personal Identity, Self and Selfhood, and Ego

Look for the referent subject in calls for its theorization and you come upon definitional slippage

across a number of related terms: “human being,” “person,” “personal identity,” “interiority,”

“self,” and “ego,” to name the most common. Sometimes those terms stand in as synonyms for

subject; sometimes they stand in as adjacent concepts to subject; and sometimes they appear in
counter-distinction to the term “subject.” The following example of a call for conference papers

captures the cluster effect: “Personal identity is the focal point of any reflective process. The

existence of subjectivity implies the demand for making sense of the self that projects meaning

to the world.”2 Personal identity, subjectivity, self. Paradoxically, the call makes perfect sense

and projects confusion at once. This slipperiness of terms can be crazy-making, especially when

someone is asked to say what the subject is or does! Some discernments become necessary.

The Human

In its simplest usage, “subject” is a common referent for a “human,” as that form of life which

feels, utters language, experiences, imagines, thinks, reflects, and acts; that form of life which

recognizes that it inhabits a world, that the world is material and imagined, and that the

materiality of the world is imbricated in its own mode of inhabiting the world. But “the human”

has been a seminal category of scientific inquiry in modernity. In Habeas Viscus: Racializing

Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander Weheliye

observes that “the human as a secular entity of scientific and humanistic inquiry has functioned

as a central topos of modernity since the Renaissance.”3 In this sense, the human is a traditional

theme (as in its place in the universe, its boundaries, its defining features, and its possible

futures), and its theorization is framed through a secular (Western) view in which the human is

already being thought of beyond the framework of religious doctrine. The human also designates

an abstract category of being that cannot be understood except in relation to other, derivative,

and abstract categories: the unhuman, the nonhuman, the inhuman, and the posthuman. The

name of the epitome of human is “Man.” Thus, the category of the fully, most advanced form of

the human is a placement, not individually but as a collectivity, upon a metaphorical schema of
differentiation: the “great chain of being” (of early modernity) or the evolutionary “ladder” (of

high modernity).

Person

The everyday usage of “person” is a referent for a sole human subject, as in “that person over

there.” In philosophy, it is used as a referent to a human being with certain attributes, among

them self-consciousness, intuition, and an ethical relation to the social field; the nature of that

“personhood” is a central concern of the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy.

Person also carries particular meanings in discourses of political theory and law. According to

anthropologist Mary Douglas, John Locke conceptualized person as a forensic term: it referred to

the figure of man in enterprise cultures prizing individual responsibility and offering great

opportunity for upward mobility.4 In this sense, person can be understood as a human being

bearing political status before the law or custom through its access to “standing,” that which

pertains to or is suitable for courts of law. Given standing before the law, a person is recognized,

or recognizable, in social contracts, economic exchange, and systems of responsibility and rights.

Interiority and Personal Identity

The concept of interiority projects a spatial metaphor; the concept of personal identity is

implicated in the question of temporal sameness. Tracking historical usage of the term

“interiority” from the early 16th century to the present, as evidenced in the Oxford English Deleted: Sixteenth
Formatted: Font: Italic
Dictionary (OED), Eduardo Lerro observes that by 1890 the concept of interiority had shifted

from an earlier feature of objects to a feature of humans, as in this OED entry taken from

William James’s Principles of Psychology: “It is surely subjectivity and interiority, which are the
notions latest acquired by the human mind.”5 Lerro notes that for James, interiority designates “a

single, qualitative, human trait applicable to the interior of both particular human beings and

humans generally conceived.”6 In this understanding, interiority functions as a spatial metaphor

for a self-identifying “internalized mirror image of the world.”7 A different referent, personal

identity has been taken up in philosophical discourse, from the ancients to John Locke in his

discussion of “Identity and Diversity” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the

present.8 In this philosophical discourse, the identity of a person is understood as sameness over

the lifetime; what philosophers define as the question of (the diachronic) persistence through

time of the (synchronic) constellation of memories, thought patterns, attributes, characteristics,

and felt experiences that persons identify with “who they are.”9 The concept of personal identity

is not the same as the concept of social identity.

Ego

In the West, the center of gravity of the pre-Enlightenment period was a soul, a shared zone of

exchange linking people to an omniscient God; the center of gravity of the human being in

Enlightenment thought became the rational, self-conscious, agentic self. Marshall Brown

observes of Descartes’s famous dictum: “The Cartesian heritage bequeathed to future

generations the mystery of an ego—an identity—that preceded thinking syntactically, logically,

and metaphysically.”10 The term “ego” is used here as a referent for a personal identity, a felt

singularity marked by its distinct being in the world. But by the early 20th century, the term Deleted: Twentieth

“ego” would take on another set of meanings, as it was defined as the conscious actor in the

world and was distinguished from the unconscious (as a reservoir of memories, feelings, and

suppressed desires that remain latent outside conscious awareness) and the id (as the center of
drives), to which Freud would add the superego (as the internalized ideals of parental and social

strictures).

Self and Selfhood

From one point of view, the term “self,” as in “me, myself, and I,” is an at-hand, everyday

referent for the grammatical pronoun “I.” The word for “self” in the English and Germanic

languages, after all, traces its etymology back to a Proto-Germanic reflexive referent for the one

who speaks. But the term “self” also commonly references an individuality, and a truth of being

that is only one’s own. Yet this seemingly universal referent is importantly a historically and Deleted: -

culturally specific understanding of what it is that makes someone fully human. It is what Terry Deleted: -

Eagleton describes as a meaning “elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position.”11

In the 17th century in the West, the concept of an “individual” as a unique, indivisible, and Deleted: Seventeenth

individuated human began to engage scientists and political philosophers. Subsequently, that

concept of the individual would be refined through 18th-century Enlightenment thought, 19th- Deleted: Eighteenth
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century Romanticism, expanding bourgeois capitalism, and Victorian optimism. Eighteenth- and

19th-century philosophers and political theorists posited a self which was breaking free from the Deleted: Nineteenth

constraints of eschatological explanation and ready-made religious dogma, that drove

interpretation and the meanings attached to the revealed Word. The human being was no longer

solely the seat of a “soul” and a repository of at-hand dogmatic interpretation; it was a self, the

individual, the center of felt, cogitative being characterized by reflexive individualism and

agentic action. Certain characteristics attached to the concept of individual self: a monadic core

of individuality; rationality, autonomy, freedom to act, and freedom from encumbrances; well-
defined, stable, and impermeable boundedness. The epitome of this achievement of modern

selfhood was the “sovereign subject” of Western progress, democratic polity, and individualism.

The term “subject” has been thought of alongside, or through, this set of related terms; but

the subject is not the same as the human, the person, interiority, personal identity, or the ego, and

not the same as the liberal humanist self, associated with rationality, individuality, autonomy,

and agency. In the academy, that subject has long been a topic of debate.

Debating the Subject in the Wake of Man

In the wake of Descartes’s cogito, British Empiricists, German Idealists, American

Transcendentalists, and others pondered the origin and nature of self-consciousness. Their

philosophical inquiries took up the origin of ideas and ideals; the role of perception, critique, and

negation; the dynamic relays of sensing, thinking, imagining, feeling, and acting; the experiential

and felt sense of self-unity; the mind/body relationship; the relationship of the subject to objects

external to it; the nature of the subject’s ongoingness through time and extension in space; and Deleted: -

the conditions of autonomy and free will.

Across the 19th and 20th centuries, major interventions in idealist theories of a universal Deleted: Nineteenth
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human subject sparked reconceptualizations of the phenomenon of consciousness. One challenge Deleted: -

came from the emerging sciences of memory and new theories of the subject’s complex psychic

structures. In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Ian Hacking

traces the ways in which by the end of the 19th century, scientists everywhere were confronted Deleted: Nineteenth
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by people unhinged and out of control, given over to trancelike states, somnambulism, hysterical

symptoms, and split personality. The drive to explanation spawned the scientific search for “the Deleted: -

truth” of memory, and with it the “truths” of psychic structures, split personality, and trauma.12
Freudian psychoanalytical thought was one such science of memory, one through which the

notion of a troubled, doubled self, riven by unconscious structures of repression and

remembering, coalesced. The emergence and rise of psychological and psychoanalytical theory,

from Pierre Janet to Sigmund Freud and beyond to Freud’s students and interpreters, introduced,

expanded upon, and revised the multipartite structuring of psychodynamic processes.

In his radical reconceptualization of Freudian theory, Jacques Lacan elaborated his theory of

the subject and subjectivity through a set of linked concepts: the “mirror stage,” the split subject,

the privileged phallus, sexual difference, the function of the capital-O Other, and the symbolic

realm of the Law of the Father. In the mirror stage, the child comes to misrecognize its image in

the presence of others as another: the image of the other reflects back to the child a figure of

coherence and unity, and in that misrecognition the split subject comes into being. The split in

the subject cannot be sutured. Thus, the coherent, autonomous self remains a fictive construct, a

fantasy of the fully present subject in language. The ego is thus an imaginary projection of an

isolated, solitary figure, a fantasy of coherence and unity. Lacan’s early-21st-century interpreter, Deleted: Twenty-First

Lorenzo Chiesa, observes that, for Lacan, the ego “is a (false) unity consisting of an extensive

macro-image in which various (ideal) images are overlaid and amalgamated, and which the child

comes to confuse with (what turns into) ‘himself’; this self/ego has thus to be considered as a

passive, mental object.”13 For Lacan, the phallus is the transcendental signifier. He reframed the

Freudian drama of castration by narrating how the phallus, signifier for the intervention of the

father and his laws in the desire of the child, offers men compensatory access to dominance in

the symbolic realm. Entering the realm of the Law, the subject takes up a sexed position as either

male or female. In this process, “woman” becomes a reified cultural Other to the phallic

masculine Subject. The idealist theory of the self as autonomous and unified has been displaced
by a theory of an illusory ego construct (a fiction, a phantasm) and a new concept of the subject,

always split, always in the process of constituting itself through its others.

Another challenge to idealist theories of the universal subject followed from Karl Marx’s

and Friedrich Engel’s social theory of economic materialism and successive reorientations in

materialist theories of consciousness and its relationship to larger forces of political economy.

Marx’s elaboration of the conditions of alienated subjects, the effects of industrial capitalism’s

commodity fetishism, and the mystification of social relations pertains to the phenomenon of

false consciousness, a term introduced by Engels, whereby the working class concedes to forms

of class domination and acts against its own interests. By the mid-20th century, two other Deleted: Twentieth

theorists had become influential in theorizing the social subject. In the wake of Marx, Louis

Althusser shifted the focus to the social subject as a subject of ideology, not in the narrow sense of

propaganda but in a sense of the pervasive cultural formations of the dominant class (what he

termed “state apparati”). Althusser differentiated “Repressive State Apparatuses” (RSAs) from

“Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs), the former, such as the police, being more openly

coercive, and the latter, such as educational institutions, less overtly coercive. Describing the

process through which RSAs and ISAs “hail” or call the subject who enters them, Althusser

speaks of the “interpellation” of individuals as certain kinds of subjects through the ideology that

permeates and reproduces the institution. Individuals come to understand themselves as

“naturally” self-produced, precisely because the processes of interpellation are hidden in

institutional practices. Fundamentally mystified by its production, the subject can begin to

comprehend its social formation through ideological critique, though critique cannot undo it. On

another tack, Michel Foucault disassociated the workings of power from specific forms of

institutional repression. Unlike Althusser, Foucault approached power not as monolithic or

centripetally concentrated in official and unofficial institutions; rather, power (with a small p) is

capillary, dispersed centrifugally, and localized in disciplining practices. Everywhere and

inescapable, it is “discursive,” present in regimes of truth and knowledge in everyday life.

Through “technologies of self,” such as the generic terms of confession, subjects materialize

through regulatory norms.

Yet another major challenge came from Simone de Beauvoir’s explosive mid-20th-century Deleted: Twentieth

announcement in The Second Sex that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”14 In her

vigorous, magisterial critique of patriarchy, Beauvoir exposed the profound dynamics of the

mobilization of concepts of sexual difference to secure women’s position as Other to Man, and

did so through an existential and phenomenological prism grounded in woman’s lived

experiences: the systematic, structural subordination of woman within patriarchy, with its

unrelentingly masculinist ideology; woman’s ascribed status as non-subject; the cultural

projections of her “natural” inferiority and lack of agency; the social construction of her

femininity; and the ambiguities of her potential to recognize the conditions of her subordination

and pursue the freedom to dismantle patriarchal structures and systems of thought. Marking the

profound import of this announcement and its critical legacy for feminist theorists at the end of

the 20th century, Judith Butler explored how Beauvoir teased out the relation of sexed bodies Deleted: Twentieth

and gender; unfixed the ontological basis of gender identity; refused an originary moment and

linear progression to this existential process; reinterpreted “the existential doctrine of choice

whereby ‘choosing’ a gender is understood as the embodiment of possibilities within a network Deleted: '
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of deeply entrenched cultural norms”15; recalibrated Hegel’s master-slave dialectic; and

challenged the persistent specter of Cartesian disembodiment in a masculinist philosophical

tradition.16
 Across the last century, academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences

established norms of inquiry and developed diverse methodologies, both qualitative and

quantitative, in order to produce knowledge about the subject in its social and psychic

dimensions and to produce histories of the erosion of certainty in a theory of the subject as

autonomous, free, and individual in favor of a theory of the subject as an effect of constitutive

constraint, of ideology, power, discourse, and structural semiosis. As more women and people of

color entered universities in North America and Europe amidst the upheavals of civil rights,

human rights, women’s rights, and worker’s rights activism, the fields of gender, sexuality, and

queer studies, ethnic studies, black studies, postcolonial studies, and disability studies and their

offshoots emerged to theorize the condition of subjects within large formations: patriarchy,

capitalist exploitation, colonialism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism. Since the

1970s, advocates for and practitioners of feminist, postmodernist, psychoanalytical, postcolonial,

and posthumanist thought troubled notions of the humanist subject and theorized the subject and

subjectivity otherwise. One encompassing project involved exposing the ideological workings of

liberal humanist thought and the subject it posits: the Western Enlightenment “self,” unitary and

monadic; the most advanced achievement of the human. Assaults exposed the exclusionary

foundations and violent effects of this ideology of the liberal subject. “Universal” Man was

really a particular kind of man, the white, male, heterosexual man of property accorded

democratic subjecthood. Fully agentic selfhood was gendered as masculine, racialized as white,

and attached to men of property in the polity and in political theory.

Theories of the human, of the legal person, and of the ego came under scrutiny with the

critique of the concept of the individualist self. With respect to the notion of the human, “the

Other” to Man—Child, Woman, Racialized Other—by virtue of its Otherness, makes the Man
the universal human of Enlightenment thought; and the capital “O” Other is consigned to the

category of less-than-fully human, closer to nature. Only certain people are accorded fully

agentic selfhood; only certain people are considered to be fully human, not limited by

circumstances of birth, racial categorization, or gender. Regarding the concept of person, such

othering effects impact what Butler described as the “relative and differential recognizability of

lives” in experiences of everyday life17; and that is the case before the law as well. In other

words, not all subjects are accorded the privileged status of person before the law, precisely

because, as Weheliye observed, “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of

personhood and who is not (habeas).”18

Critiques of the “individualist self” prompted critiques of psychoanalytical theories of the Deleted: involved
Deleted: reconsiderations of the concept
“ego” as well. Recognizing the degree to which questions of gender and sexuality remained Commented [LJ2]: AU and from OUP: Please please
clarify this sentence’s intended meaning. Readers may be
undertheorized in materialist and psychoanalytical theories of the subject, feminists in Europe confused about “reconsiderations as well”?

and the United States rethought the working of power in materialist and psychodynamic

processes. For instance, they challenged theories of the ego in psychoanalysis and ego

psychology, critiquing the ways in which the fields accounted for difference in effects of the

dynamic mechanisms for the boy child and girl child, and in the early 20th century for the Deleted: Twentieth

intersex child. They also exposed how theories of the ego were insufficiently attentive to the

specificity of dynamics for those subjects identified as undesirable others, and to the complex Deleted: abjected

interactions of multiple forms of abjection and oppression. Commented [LJ3]: AU: Is adjection okay here, or
abjection? abjection
A second project involved developing in greater depth the analysis of subjection, the process Deleted: d

through which the subject is an effect of the structural dynamics of both large-P and small-p

power: the social enforcement of regulatory norms à la Foucault, the ideological interpellation of

subjects through state apparatuses à la Althusser, the double consciousness of W. E. B. Du Bois,

and the colonization of psychic processes à la Franz Fanon. A third project involved coining new

modifiers for the term “subject” to differentiate kinds of subjects of specific historical, political,

and socioeconomic conditions. These adjectival terms include “hybrid,” “marginal,” Deleted: include:

“migratory,” “diasporic,” “minoritized,” “nomadic,” “mimic,” and, in the last decades,

“transnational,” “transcultural,” and “stateless.” This third project also involved spinning new Deleted: move

metaphors for theorizing the complexities of subjectivity, primary among them the term

“intersectionality.” A fourth project challenged various deconstructive frameworks for the way

they theorized the death of the subject, or the dispersal of the subject into fragments, or the

disappearance of the subject in processes of becoming. Theorists detailed how these frameworks

failed to account for the ways in which certain subjects are denied full humanity and thus full

subject status, the critical ground for lodging claims of rights, justice, and reparation.

As theorists pursued these projects, whether in systematic or targeted forays, they invoked a

cluster of concepts through which to think of the subject differently: relationality, agency,

identity, and embodiment. The logic of this ensemble of terms is elegantly correlated to the

defining features of the traditional idealist subject. The discussion of relationality pertains to the

problematic nature of the individualist subject’s autonomy and boundedness. The discussion of

agency is required in order to engage issues of the transformation of consciousness and the

grounds of action. The discussion of identity is required to adequately theorize the impact of Deleted: on the subject

specific social relations and material conditions on the subject. The discussion of embodiment

pertains to the dimensions of the body’s dynamic materiality, its very materialization through

social relations, and its relations to other kinds of bodies.

Subject, Other, Relationality

The concept of subject cannot be disentangled from the concept of relationality; but relationality

comes in many forms. Relationality inheres in the very utterance of an “I,” the linguistic and Deleted: kinds

rhetorical marker that projects a fantasy of presence for the singularity of somebody. To say “I”

is to address an Other. “In the light of a unique and unrepeatable identity—irremediably exposed

and contingent,” Adriana Cavarero argued, “the other is therefore a necessary presence.”19 In the

necessary presence of a “you,” whether a real or imagined interlocutor, the subject becomes what

Cavarero termed a “narratable self.” She went on to observe that the “unique existent” is “an

identity which, from beginning to end, is intertwined with other lives—with reciprocal exposures

and innumerable gazes—and needs the other’s tale.”20 On a fundamental level, then, the subject Deleted: ,

is a subject of rhetorical relationality, desirous of the recognition of an Other. Other theorists of

this fundamental relationality invoked Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic subjectivity as an

explanatory concept: subjects become conscious through language; social groups have their

social dialects, through which subjects become conscious; yet language itself is heteroglossic and

thereby riven with multiple meanings. In other words, otherness crosses the tongue or fingers

whenever words are spoken, written, or signed, a kind of glottal relationality of heteroglossia,

since the very words the “I” says come to the subject spoken by others.21

A second strand of theorizing relationality came through psychoanalysis. In versions of

Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of the subject, Other is multivalent: the other of the symbolic

system—of what is sayable, of the very signifying system that slides across tongues or fingers;

the Other of primary relations; the Other of the unconscious, that is, the Other within. French

feminists intervened in Lacan’s tripartite psychic structure to delineate different versions of

relationality: Julia Kristeva elaborated a pre-symbolic realm of infancy in the concept of the

instinctual semiotic associated with the Mother; and she described the psychodynamic process of
abjection, through which the threatening unruliness and disturbances of order and orderliness are Commented [MOU4]: THE WORD IS ABJECTION
Formatted: Highlight
repressed for the Oedipal resolution of the boy’s entry into the symbolic to be achieved.22 In the

Anglo-American field of ego psychology, Nancy Chodorow elaborated a different relationality

of the girl child to the boundedness that comes to define the impact of the boy child’s necessary

separation from the Mother.23 This was a gendered relationality of permeable ego boundaries.

Theorists of all schools uncomfortable with “difference” feminism, and those influenced by

Foucault and Althusser, located relationality in the dynamics of the subject’s subjectivation. For

Butler, “The ‘I’ who cannot come into being without a ‘you’ is also fundamentally dependent on

a set of norms of recognition that originated neither with the ‘I’ nor with the ‘you.’”24 This form

of psychic relationality is an effect of small-p power in Foucault’s version of subjection, and of Deleted: the small- p of
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interpellation in Althuser’s version of subject formation. In the former sense, it is the Deleted: of
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relationality of regulatory norms that precede us. Elsewhere, Butler wrote that gender and
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sexuality are “modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed by virtue of Deleted: ian
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another.”25 Norms inhabit subjects and impel them to certain conditions of performativity

through which they secure the norms as their own; and sometimes expose the instability of the

norm through their failures to conform. In the case of interpellation, relationality involves the

dynamic through which the subject is positioned within naturalized social locations of

institutions, such as schools and bureaucracies, ideological agendas, and geopolitical formations.

In the last decade, theorists explored another dimension of the subject’s relationality in

dynamic webs of assemblages, of which human subjects are but one node. Relationality in this

theorization is not just between subjects and the forces of subjection, or between individual

subjects and the addressee of their narratability; rather the force fields and networks of

relationality buzz along flows and currents and myriad interactions that join subjects to Deleted: a
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environments, processes internal and external to them, forms of matter, and other species. Stacy

Alaimo proposed an ecological relationality as trans-corporeality in Bodily Natures: Science,

Environment, and the Material Self. Elaborating how “the human is always intermeshed with the

more-than-human world,” she argued that this “thinking across bodies may catalyze the

recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a

resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and

actions;” with this recognition, she insisted, may come acknowledgment of “the often Deleted: ;

unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems,

chemical agents, and other actors.”26

A return to the relationality of the subject’s narrated life is apropos here. The rhetorical

figures, narrative strategies, modes of address, and generic forms tapped in personal storytelling

are all reservoirs of antecedent others, conduits of relationality of the “social world that is

beyond us and before us,” as Butler observed.27 In this way, the personal storytelling of subjects,

rehearsing and exemplifying relationality, invites a response; and the nature of that response and

responsibility opens onto questions of ethical relationality. Cavarero approached the question by

calling for an ethics that does not privilege responses of empathy and identification, feeling for

or feeling as another; for her, “an altruistic ethics of relation does not support empathy,

identification, or confusions. Rather, this ethic desires a you that is truly an other, in her Formatted: Font: Italic

uniqueness and distinction. No matter how much you are similar and consonant, says this ethics,

your story is never my story.”28 In other words, the ethics of relationality can be said to be an

ethics that recognizes incommensurability. Butler approached the question of ethical relationality

by invoking the subject’s primary vulnerability and the need to “vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a
kind of possession”: to risk such evacuation requires a “willingness to become undone in relation

to others” as “our chance of becoming human.”29

The exercise of brute power and dehumanizing epistemological regimes means that some

groups of people are differentially positioned vis-à-vis social norms of intelligibility, discursive

regimes, and material conditions of discovery, invasion, colonization, slavery, and the civilizing

mission. These formations comprise the historical conditions of the relationality of subordinated

others. Constrained life scripts have been written of them and for them by others through slow

and eruptive violence, the result being that the value of their storytelling, testimony, knowledge- Deleted: with

making, and political claims goes unacknowledged or unrecognized, and the uniqueness of their

narratability unsolicited, their expectation of recognition forestalled. The othering effect of this

kind of relationality becomes the experiential history of being spoken for, and being represented

as, a dehumanized, unmarked, less-than-human, unintelligible Other.30 Coming at the question of

relationality and ethics from the history of those experiencing radical dehumanization and

violence for their “otherness,” Weheliye implicitly pointed to an ethics of relational alterity.

Relationalities of the present, he argued, are “existent hierarchies;” to counter this dehumanizing Deleted: ;

relationality requires people to “design novel assemblages of relation” 31 from models of

“alternative critical, political, and poetic assemblages.”32

These reorientations of the dynamics of relationality resonate with Beauvoir’s concept of an

ethics of ambiguity articulated in the mid-20th century. Recognizing the importance of Deleted: Twentieth
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Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity to later theorizing of relationality, Françoise Lionnet

explored how Beauvoir refused to reify the self-enclosed ego and disembodiment of thought

persistent through the history of Western philosophy, and proposed instead an ethics of

nurturance, of intersubjectivity, of an acknowledged otherness that is not a projection of the self-

contained ego but an exchange with other “existants.” This “nurturing,” Lionnet argued, “is thus

a relation that seeks, not to abolish difference or make all relation into self-relation, but to

establish the difference of another, the nurtured one.”33

Ultimately, there are different kinds of relationality connecting the subject to the social: of

psychic otherness within, and the pulsions of affective response to others coursing through

bodies; of subjection to larger constellations of proxy others enforcing regulatory norms and

reproducing othering processes that render certain subjects insignificant, threatening, or

unintelligible; of linguistic dialogism and narratability; of ethical response and responsibility;

and of interacting materiality, involving other species, technologies, and the agglomerations of

assemblages. Relationality is multidimensional, transactional, and at once self-locating and self-

dispossessing. Through its mechanisms of connection, the subject is materialized and undone,

possessed and dispossessed, and comes to know itself and confront its own opacity,34 again and

again.

Subject and Agency

As contributors to the volume Inventing Agency argued through essays on subjects, causalities,

and judgment, the subject conceptualized by the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment

and Romantic periods was the subject as an embodiment and expression of “agency in action.”35

Agency has commonly been thought of as the power of human beings to think, transform

consciousness, make claims in and on the world, act, and resist assaults on their sovereignty.

This is the premier modality of what it means to be human and to be recognized as bearing the

identity of universal Man, constituted by rationality, autonomy, self-possession, and free will as

grounds for that action. Two major questions motivated discussions of agency over the last four
decades. Who achieves or is ascribed the status of agentic subject? And what exactly constitutes

agency in the context of the subject’s subjection as constitutive constraint?

As to the first question, over the last three decades theorists exposed how this figure of

liberal humanist Man and its universalist foundation was, as noted earlier, an exclusionary one.

Women were not included in the category of universal Man; nor were subjugated peoples around

the world under conditions of slavery and colonization; nor were the mentally ill and severely

disabled. All these categories of people were represented as not fully rational, autonomous, or in

control of their willpower, and therefore as not fully human, agentic subjects. In Habeas Viscus, Deleted: they were
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Weheliye mused that “[i]f racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but Deleted: as

as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-

humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power

structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claims to full human status and

which humans cannot.”36 Constrained in the skeins of discipline, unable to lodge claims to

knowledge-making power, and subjected to slow and eruptive violence, those represented as less

than human are stripped literally and figuratively of their agency. The question of urgency

becomes, how does one resist? Deleted: .

As to the second question: As theorists of subjectivity countered earlier theories of the

subject, they ran up against the problem of human agency. Theorists of liberal humanism insisted

on the viability of agency in making claims for rights in the public sphere and before the law,

whether in national venues or in the human rights arena. They explored such phenomena as

oppositional resistance to coercive states and institutions, routes to self-empowerment, social

visibility, transformation of consciousness and social location, and activist tactics and strategies.

The question of the very possibility of human agency in the context of implacable regulatory
norms and interpellation has been especially urgent for feminists of color, poststructuralists, and

postmodernists. In the framework of materialist analysis, the issue is one of consciousness-

raising; in the framework of postmodernist theorizing, the issue is one of escaping the subject

effect.

Those who worked within certain strands of psychoanalytic theories of the subject explored

the impact of the unconscious and preconscious on the subject as it interacts with others and the Deleted: -

world. In their explorations of the subject’s fundamental incoherence and its fantasy of

coherence, they were challenged to mark the illusion of autonomy and rationality so centrally

linked to the liberal notion of agency and to make the argument that the unconscious itself

generates creative intervention. It offers the creativity of what Teresa de Lauretis described as

the psychic domain of disidentification within the constitutive constraint of the symbolic realm37

and what Butler described as the repository of repressed desires that regulatory norms enforce.

This “abject” within, Butler positioned as “a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the

very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.”38

Others grounded theories of agency in creative rupture of individuals and of communities, Deleted: ,

what de Certeau termed the “transverse tactics” through which subjects individually or in groups Deleted: of
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manipulate spaces and systems of constraint and experiment with modes of reuse and Deleted: ,
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reconfigurations of identities.39 It might involve play with the plasticity and profligacy of

language, or the wit to play with what anthropologist Sherry Ortner termed “the rules of the Deleted: i
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game.”40 It might be the performativity theorized by Butler; that is, the “reiteration of a norm or

set of norms” that effectively “conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a

repetition,” and thereby undermines their coherence.41 It might be the queering of identity

categories, or the confounding of identities and desires, as found in Kate Bornstein’s Gender
Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us: “My identity as a transsexual lesbian whose female

lesbian lover transitioned to gay male is manifest in my fashion statement—both my identity and

fashion are based on collage.”42 The central thrust of Weheliye’s Habeas Viscous as well was

this question of creativity: “[W]hat different modalities of the human come to light if we do not

take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has

been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?”43 These explanatory

paradigms captured tactical ways in which forms of agentic action and impact are psychically

glimpsed and historically inflected. Deleted: -

Theories of agency attempt to account for the forces and factors that preclude, impede, or

thwart the exercise of a subject’s agency, self-production, and self-empowerment: the

unconscious, affects, regulatory norms, social interpellations, disciplines of thought, and

knowledge production. Yet there are always other ways to propose a relation of subject to

agency. Butler, for instance, reminds theorists that the relation of subject and agency may be Deleted: d

more a model than a description of individuals in action: “[W]hen we are speaking about the

‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for

agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on notions of sovereign power.”44 Others

whose inquiries took up issues of agentic action in cultures outside the West argued that the

definition of agency at hand, the signs of agency commonly equated with autonomy, rationality,

and free will, are not the only defining features of agentic actions, or that they are insufficiently

attentive to the ways in which agency can be exercised and embodied differently. Exploring the

potential of women in Egypt’s piety movement to transgress gender norms of femininity and

pious womanhood, Saba Mahmood argued that the body may have an agentic force in enabling

religious women to negotiate “significatory systems of gender”: “From this perspective,

transgressing gender norms may not be a matter of transforming ‘consciousness’ or effecting

change in the significatory system of gender, but might well require the retraining of

sensibilities, affect, desire, and sentiments—those registers of corporeality that often escape the

logic of representation and symbolic articulation.”45 Mahmood challenged the equation of free

will and agency in Western moral philosophy, proposing instead that another theory of subject

formation is required to account for the ethical practice of pious Muslim women, a practice of

embodied relationship to the divine as empowerment.

In the early 21st century, materialist theories of agency dislodged the human actor as the Deleted: Twenty-First

center of its operation as they responded to the question about whether agency is solely exercised

by human beings. Agency is relocated in assemblages of humans, materials, systems of Deleted: ,

distribution, aspects of political economies, and technological affordances, all nodes in an ever-

shifting confluence of actors. This was Jane Bennett’s argument about distributed agency in

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. In this project, Bennett brought matter back from

the deadness ascribed to it, reanimating matter to move beyond liberal theory of the human

agency of intentionality and will, psychoanalytic theories of agency as an intersubjective

phenomenon, and theories of agency within the constitutive constraints of discourse, discipline,

and interpellation. As Bennett observed of the assemblage: “Each member and proto-member of

the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as

such: an agency of the assemblage. And precisely because each member-actant maintains an

energetic pulse slightly ‘off’ from that of the assemblage, an assemblage is never a stolid block

but an open-ended collective, a ‘non-totalizing sum.’”46

Subject and Identity

In his essay on Descartes’s cogito, Marshal Brown presented the word “identity” as a synonym

of “ego.”47 In Brown’s invocation of the term, identity designates that which is distinctively

human, in its myriad specificities; the life-bearing center of capacities and characteristics that Deleted: of
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differentiate someone from all others. It is “who a person is,” as various dictionaries define it,

whatever “who,” in this instance, means! But, thinking more precisely or, rather, more Deleted: ,

complexly about identity itself, as related to but distinct from person, self, interiority, and ego,

prompted theorists to reorient the relationship of identity to subject.

The commonplace way of approaching the term “identity” is to conceptualize identities as

attributes of persons. But, given that a subject is in a continual, relational exchange with the

world and others, identity is fundamentally a social phenomenon, an effect of sociality, an effect

of the everyday discourses of sameness and difference across the social field. There have been

many ways in which social identity has been theorized and deployed methodologically across the Deleted: is

last four decades. Historians approached it not as ontologically fixed and timeless but in need of

historicization. Identities have histories; and they are contextually marked by culture and

geographical location. That is, they are embedded within multiple temporalities (that arrive

across different, overlapping, and disparate spans of time) and spatialities (that arise in their

saliency in local, national, regional, and global arenas). Historians and cultural critics variously

theorized identity as a lived social and historical location (or positionality) on a sociocultural

grid. For some, the term “identity” is invoked to explore the effects of material conditions and

the collective consciousness of victimization.48 This placement in a collectivity involves a Deleted: (Angela Davis 190)

category of relative privilege or victimization, a social categorization of groups of people

translated by means of ascribed difference into systemic operations of norms and large-scale

formations such as slavery, slow and eruptive violence, and macro- and micro-distributions of Deleted:
(dis)advantage. In the work of postcolonial, feminist, women-of-color, and queer theorists, Deleted: /

identity was understood as a praxis, in that it can be a potential site of opposition to dominant

norms49; a site from which to stage critique, or strategically speak truth to power, or make claims Deleted: (see Cathy Cohen 438-9)

for recognition and reparation, or recover and memorialize the past, or form community and

affiliation. In other words, identities sometimes function as sites from which to claim and

exercise knowledge-making capacity amidst unequal power relations.

A methodology emerged to give recognition to the experiential history of living in

conditions of multiple, heterogeneous identities, of being gendered as “masculine” or

“feminine,” say, and racialized as “black” or “white.” That approach employs the method of

intersectional analysis, as exemplified by Elizabeth Cole’s essay on intersectionality in

psychology research. In the social sciences, as Cole elucidated, identity is deployed as a Deleted: exemplified

demographic variable; thus, Cole talked of identity as “the occupation of a category” and one

node in the “tripartite constellation of identity, difference, and disadvantage.”50 For three Deleted: T

decades, theorists have spent effort developing, modifying, and rejecting aspects of intersectional

analysis, prompting recent theorists of identity to move in different directions. Given the Deleted: has
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multiplicity of identities which people cycle through on a daily basis, how can the analytic of Deleted: ed

intersectionality encompass the lived complexity of the social identities of subjects, and do so

without fixing categories? For, identities constitute the contingencies of the subject’s Deleted: .

relationality; and due to contingencies, an adequate accounting of the heterogeneity even within

salient identity categories can remain elusive.

Given such a thorny theoretical task in accounts of the subject, it is no wonder that in the

early 21st century, theorists shifted the framework on identity as fixedness in the social field, Deleted: Twenty-First

tapping metaphors that emphasize cohesion amidst flows of difference. For instance, identity was
theorized as a “temporary cohesion,” or a sticking or landing point in the play of difference in the

posthumanist theorizing of Elizabeth Grosz: “Difference is the name we can give to any

identity—minoritarian, majoritarian, pure or hybrid—for it is the force that underlies all

temporary cohesions as well as the possibility of their dispersions.”51 Grosz’s retheorization of

identity sought to find some way out of the politics of subjectivation: “How,” she asked, “can we

transform the ways in which identity is conceived so that identities do not emerge and function

only through the suppression and subordination of other social identities?”52 And, in her critique Deleted: .

of the common understanding of intersectionality as an analytic, Jasbir K. Puar observed that

“[n]o matter how intersectional our models of subjectivity, no matter how attuned to locational

politics of space, place, and scale, these formulations—these fine tunings of intersectionality, as

it were, that continue to be demanded—may still limit us if they presume the automatic primacy

and singularity of the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation.”53 Puar shifted

metaphors to the assemblage and the theoretical framework to assemblage theory, and resituated

categories of identity as “events, actions, and encounters between bodies rather than simply

entities and attributes of subjects.”54

These modes of theorizing identity shift the frame on subjectivity. Identity is redefined as

action rather than a feature of subjects; it is a cohesion in force fields, an entanglement and

encounter, a doing and undoing, rather than a being.

Subject, Embodiment, Materiality

The humanist concept of subject thinks of the body as the material form of a singularity, an

isolating carapace, a discrete, bounded fixity. It could be said that in this way the body speaks the

presence of a subject, or manifests the form of the subject, establishing the material limit of the
human singularity in its specific alignment and contours of surficial matter. But that would be to

think of the body as other to mind or subjectivity, when the body is multivalent with regard to

subjectivity, far more than form and surface, though it is that. It is a weighty organism of

systems, of genetic material, neural networks, organs, senses, bones, and sinew, all in continuous

exchange with the external world. The body is thus a penetrable membrane, an interactive

surface, and thereby a social body. It is a site of visibility and intelligibility, a provocateur of

interpretation. It is political, a materialization of regulatory norms through which certain

identities and life scripts are naturalized. As Butler argued in Bodies That Matter, it is “power’s

most productive effect.”55 The body is a diagnostic site of medicalization, and itself a historical

memorial; it bears the marks of violent histories, the scars of the slave, the bruises of sexual

violation, the fragments of tortured hands, and the missing limbs of human degradation and

oppression. It is a switching point for vibrant matter, biological inheritance, historical legacy,

ecological imprint, and memorial reserves. For memory itself is in an effect of matter, its

synapses and its neural plasticity.

In the last two decades, theorists elaborated further dimensions of the relationship of body

and subject. The first set of dimensions comes from various strands of posthumanist thought.

Assemblage theory informed the “nomadic thought” of Rosi Braidotti, who described the body

as “an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and

consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an ‘individual’

self.’”56 The body’s fluxes of transformation migrate through different channels with the

technological revolution, to a networked and digital sociality of virtual and literal embodiments.

Online lives are lived via the virtual embodiments of avatars and surrogate selves in gaming.

Human bodies don robotic prosthetics, joining silicon to carbon, and algorithm in the body’s
networks of materialization. Subjects and subjectivity migrate to digital ecologies in which

software, fleshware, hardware, network, silicon, and carbon constitute being in the fluid

movements across virtual worlds and real life, a transformation of subjectivity and embodiment

in the time of computation, as explored by Katherine Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer: Deleted:
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“Encountering intelligent machines from this perspective enables me to see that they are neither

objects to dominate nor subjects threatening to dominate me. Rather, they are embodied entities

instantiating processes that interact with the processes that I instantiate as an embodied human

subject. The experience of interacting with them changes me incrementally, so the person who

emerges from the encounter is not exactly the same person who began it.”57 Finally, Donna

Haraway’s forays into trans-species relationality directed affect outward from its human-centric

circulation to shift the notion of relationality to companionate species, the touch of animal to

animal: “Through their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehensions’ or graspings, beings

constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist their relating.”58

A second dimension derives from affect theory and understandings of the ways in which

bodies are riven with and riveted by eruptive pulsions, often associated with emotions, that

materialize in the body as feelings and bodily dispositions of positive, neutral, and negative

responses. Affects expose the feltness of lived experience. They expose matrices of biological Deleted: ; and
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processes and social norms, operations of power, and the circulation of what Sarah Ahmed terms Deleted: are

“the rippling effect of emotion.”59 In The Politics of Emotion, Ahmed elaborated a theory of Deleted: (44).

“affective economies,” such as hate: “[M]y model of hate as an affective economy suggests that

emotions do not positively inhabit anybody or anything, meaning that ‘the subject’ is simply one

nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination. This is extremely important: it

suggests that the sideways and backwards movement of emotions such as hate is not contained
within the contours of a subject. The unconscious is hence not the unconscious of a subject, but

the failure of presence—or, the failure to be present—that constitutes the relationality of subject,

objects, signs and others.”60 Joining Marxist materialist and psychoanalytic frameworks, Ahmed Deleted: (46).

shifted the locus of affect from individuals to the conditions of encounters: “It is through

affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the

subject an identity that is apart from others.”61 Economies of negative affects and emotions do Deleted: (Ahmed 52-3).

the work of materializing the exclusion of some people from the category of the fully human,

their consignment to the category of less than human. Deleted: -

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A third dimension of the relationship of the subject and the body involves new engagements

with normative ablebodiedness, as theorized by scholars and activists in disability studies, often Deleted: -

triangulated with queer theory. Here are two examples. Mel Y. Chen critiqued the “corporal

exceptionalism” of the subject, as he ponders the significance of toxins and toxicity in his queer

body and its relationship to the racialization of lead toxicity in toys imported into the United

States from Asia. Joining object-oriented ontology to disability and queer theory, Chen Deleted:

conceptualized a queer subject of human/object attachment. Living in a toxic environment in

which the body is always under assault and through which he moves as a masked man, Chen

found an affective relationship with his couch, a safe space, an intimate partner of respite from

discomfort and pain, “The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the

couch is made of mammalian skin,” he writes.62 And in Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Deleted: (278)

Neurological Queerness, Melanie Yergeau, a neuro-queer scholar of rhetoric, exposed “the ways

in which diagnosis of the non-rhetoricity of autism denies autistic people not only agency, but

their very humanity.”63 Yergeau at once elaborated the argument “that autistic people and their Deleted: developed

neuro-circuitry queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency,”64 and wrote as queer autistic Deleted:
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subject. Confronting the “clinicalization of rhetoric,” she played with language, turning nouns

into verbs to capture the motioning of the embodied rhetor as autistic subject and displaying the

pleasures of repetition as communicative idiom. Authoring Autism is a neuro-queering of the

discourse on autism and an autie-ethnography through which Yergeau spoke the embodied

“autistic experiential.”

The Subject, a Metaphor, and Modest Definition

Theories converge, butt against, contest, and refine other theories. Psychic processes become

increasingly complex; forces of subjection increasingly intense; and the enumeration of

regulatory norms multiplies. Attention to embodiment keeps returning; identity vectors

proliferate; the problem of agency becomes almost intractable; and the entangled filaments and

filiations of relational dynamics extend temporally, socially, and ecologically. The subject has

become a universe in itself.

What does this mean? A cosmological metaphor may offer a way to visualize the challenge

of encompassing the scope of activity involved in reconceptualizing the subject, though in its

inadequacy it may raise more questions than it is worth. Think of the individual subject as an

“earth” with layers and layers of matter that matters inside its surface forms of embodiment. At

the center is something that might be called a core or a molten roiling process. There are layers

and networks of forces, systems, and sedimentary materials (such as those of memory, or of

disidentifications) inside the surface of the body of this earth. Outside the earth are atmosphere,

gravity, vacuum, and other bodies such as suns and invisible black holes, and an expanding

universe through which the long tails of the Big Bang trail and histories of large and small

swerves register. From the earth extend technological affordances that expand the reach of
earthliness, and touch or intersect with external bodies. The history of the universe flows through

its atomic structure, in the debris and gasses and particles at hand for universe building. The Deleted: ;

forces of gravity hold it in place, but the earth is constantly in transformation within its

gravitational forces.

Now think of this earth as a sensing, feeling, thinking, acting entity, with the capacity to

reflect on itself. It developed in its early existence through relations of dependency and

eventually coalesced as a singularity of experiential being through its entanglements with Deleted: s

language and symbolic systems. It is unconscious of its inner systems of embodiment, except in

certain crises; it is riven by deep psychic mechanisms and the neurochemistry of the brain,

affecting sites and dynamics of remembering. The externalities to this world are metaphors of the

external forces also constitutive of the subject, imbricated in its very materiality, its psychic

mechanisms, and its creative imagination. Of course, any metaphor, especially in this case one

that attempts to be suggestive about such a difficult concept of the subject, breaks down the

longer it is spun.

So here’s an attempt at a definition: The term “subject” signifies the living process enfolding

and enfolded in unconscious psychic forces, rational thought, drives and affects, historical

conditions of social formation, regulatory norms and ideological interpellation, genetic, neurally Deleted: -

networked, and quantum matter, entanglements of human, trans-species, and ecological relations,

and assemblages of carbon and silicon, vibrant matter, and multinodal forcefields. But then Deleted: -
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again, it may be that the concept of subject has become a fetish object, an addiction in theorizing,

and that, as Jasbir Y. Puar insists, it may be time to move beyond the presumption of “the

automatic primacy and singularity of the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation.”65
 This article began with the attempt to discern distinctions among a profusion of oft-invoked Deleted: essay

referents that circulate in proximity to the term “subject.” It now concludes with a profusion of

definitions which relate to the social action registered through invocation of the term “subject.”

Subject designates the bearer of unique human existence, a person, an individual. Subject locates

a switching point between internal and external worlds. Subject confounds the distinction

between the singularity and the social. Subject names the effect of subjectivation. Subject enacts

becoming. Subject becomes itself encounters. Subject functions as figure. Subject provides a

heuristic for answering philosophy’s most intractable questions. Subject generates metaphors.

Subject, as a fetish object of theorists, forecloses revisionary approaches to the human. Subject

sparks an inexhaustible supply of questions, quandaries, and ambiguities.

Discussion of the Literature

Since the late 17th century in the West, the topics of subject and subjectivity have driven the Deleted: Seventeenth
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production of philosophical tomes by Descartes, the English Empiricists, German Idealists, and

Psychoanalytical, Marxist, Continental, and Analytic philosophers and thinkers, among them

Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Beauvoir, Foucault, Althusser, Badiou, Habermas, Arendt, and

Kristeva. Their books provide deep dives into particular aspects and traditions of theorizing the

subject, along with glosses of the debates at stake, as do the recent interpretations of these works,

such as Lorenzo Chiesa’s engagement with the development of Lacan’s theory over time in

Subjectivity and Otherness and Butler’s various engagements with Foucault and Nietzsche.

Theorists of color (academic and activist) and Marxist, feminist, queer, postcolonial,

transnational, posthumanist, and disability theorists continue the critique of certain theories of

the subject as they ponder intersecting issues of relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.
Nick Mansfield’s Subjectivity: Theory of the Self from Freud to Haraway, provides a handy

overview of this exploration of subjectivity to the year 2000. Theorists often elaborate some

aspect of their take on subject and subjectivity with reference to deep readings of particular

literary texts, as do Butler in her reading of Antigone, Cavarero in her reading of The Odyssey,

and Hortense Spillers in readings of Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave, Written by

Himself. Contemporary literary and cultural studies theorists often draw upon particular theories

of the subject to energize their deep readings of modernist, postcolonial, and postmodernist

novels, lyric poetry, film, life writing, and performance. There are studies of expressive

representations of the subjectivity in, for instance, stream-of-consciousness techniques in Deleted: stream
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modernist literature and modes of representing the felt experience of internal consciousness in

lyric poetry or in soliloquy. Genres of particular interest in exploring questions of subject and

subjectivity are various forms of life writing, capaciously defined: traditional autobiography,

memoir, testimony, trauma narrative, autosomatography, online life writing, and confession, to

name only a few. Many essays and books offer deep readings of particular texts as a way to

accumulate examples of various kinds of subjectivity, as in studies of black subjectivity, feminist

subjectivity, transgender subjectivity, or subjectivity in the expressive cultures of nationally

based literatures. Many scholars take up questions of traumatic remembering in literatures of Deleted: -

witness, including studies of Holocaust narratives and human rights testimonies across the globe. Deleted: y

Illuminations of agentic subjectivity as telling, “ other”-wise drive the engagements with black

women’s subjectivity theorized by Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, and the articulations of

indigenous subjectivity (“subjectivity in community”66) theorized by Hertha D. Sweet Wong.

Explorations such as Weheliye’s elaborate how subordinated subjects imagine and represent
alternative ways of being human in the world. And recently, studies of comics and graphic

narratives explore the grammar of this hybrid form and its visual/textual interface in order to

assay how multimediated narratives and visualized avatars of the subject operate in the invitation Deleted: -

to interpretative exchange of intersubjectivity between text and readers. Finally, exciting studies

in the early 21st century track the effects of the migration of subjects and subjectivity to digital Deleted: Twenty-First

ecologies and the transformations to algorithmic subjectivity, as in the work of Katherine Hayles.

Links to Digital Materials

Critical Posthumanism Network. *Genealogy of the

Posthuman[http://criticalposthumanism.net/genealogy/]*. An online, independently Formatted: Font: Not Italic

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published resource based in the UK. General editors: Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter, and

Manuela Rossini.

*The Feminist Theory Website[https://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html]*. A resource

created by Dr. Kristin Switala and hosted by the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture,

Virginia Tech University.

*Illuminations: The Critical Theory Website[http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/]*.

Created by Douglas Brown and Douglas Kellner of the University of Texas, a resource

focused on the Frankfurt School.

*Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy[http://www.iep.utm.edu/]*. An open-access Deleted:

encyclopedia founded in 1995 and sustained by volunteer work of editors, authors, and

technical advisers. It provides detailed, scholarly, peer-reviewed information on key topics Deleted:

and philosophers in all areas of academic philosophy.

*The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism[https://litguide.press.jhu.edu/]*.

Edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szema, and compiled by 275
 specialists from around the world. The Guide presents a comprehensive historical survey of Deleted: ,

the field’s most important figures, schools, and movements and is updated annually.

*Marxists Internet Archive[https://www.marxists.org/]*. A volunteer, non-profit public library,

run by a collective of volunteers, MIA is a resource for works across a broad array of

political, philosophical, and scientific thought.

*PhilPapers[https://philpapers.org/]*. A comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy

maintained by the community of philosophers, under the general editorship of David Bourget

and David Chalmers.

*Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html]*. Sponsored by

the Metaphysics Research Lab and under the general editorship of Edward N. Zalta, this

resource organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to

create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.

*Voice of the Shuttle[http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp]*. Under the guidance of *Alan

Liu[http://vos.ucsb.edu/liu-profile.asp]* and a support team at the University of California,

Santa Barbara *English Department[http://www.english.ucsb.edu/]*, this resource provides

extensive links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet.

Further Reading Commented [MOU5]: I HAVE RETURNED THE

INITIALS FOR MIDDLE NAMES BECAUSE THAT IS
THE NAME ON THE BOOK OR ARTICLE. YOU CAN’T
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2014. JUST ELIMINATE THEM.

Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In Material

Feminisms. Edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237–64. Bloomington: Indiana Deleted: ,
Deleted: edited
University Press, 2008. Deleted: , IN

Beauvoir, Simone de. Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by B. Frechtman. New York: Citadel Deleted: ,
Deleted: ,
Press, 1976. Deleted: (1947)
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. New Deleted: ———.
Formatted: Indent: Left: 0", Hanging: 0.31"
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Deleted: (1949)

Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology.” Theory,

Culture & Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 197–208. Deleted: .

Brodsky, Claudia, and Eloy LaBrada, eds. Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and

Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Butler, Judith. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72 Deleted: ———._______.

(1986): 35–49. Deleted: , Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford Deleted: ———.
Deleted: California
University Press, 1997.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London: Routledge, 2000.

Chen, Mel Y. “Toxic Animacies, Intimate Affections.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay

Studies 17: 2-3 (2011): 265-86.

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Edited by

Stockholm Institute of Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Deleted: Boca Raton
Deleted: The
Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011.

Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the

Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,

149–182. New York: Routledge, 1990. Commented [SN6]: Please provide editor names! THE
BOOK IS BY HARAWAY. THIS IS A CHAPTER
Haraway, Donna J. “When Species Meet: Introductions.” In When Species Meet, 3–44. Deleted: ———.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Commented [SN7]: Please provide editor names! THIS
BOOK IS BY HARAWAY. THIS IS THE
INTRODUCTION
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC:
Deleted: ———.
Duke University Press, 2016.
Deleted: Books

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,

and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Deleted: , IL

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Deleted: Mae

Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism,

Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Edited by Cheryl Wall, 16–37. New Brunswick, NJ: Deleted: ,
Deleted: Professor
Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Kroker, Arthur. Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2012.

Lionnet, Françoise. “Consciousness and Relationality: Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Beauvoir, and

Glissant.” Yale French Studies 123 (2013): 100–117. Deleted: , Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: NYU

Press, 2000.

Oforlea, Aaron Ngozi. James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male

Subjectivity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Deleted: OH

Oliver, Kelly. Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers.

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.

Puar, Jasbir K. “‘I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Deleted: K.

Assemblage Theory.” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2, no. 1 (2012): Deleted: .

49–66.
 Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97. Deleted: .
Deleted: W.
Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleted: .

Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Deleted: J

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Visweswaran, Kamala. “Betrayal: An Analysis in Three Acts.” In Fictions of Feminist

Ethnography, 40–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Commented [SN8]: Please provide editor names! THERE
ARE NO EDITORS. THIS IS A BOOK BY
VISWESWARAN, IT IS THE CHAPTER TITLE.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Deleted: G
Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Deleted: Books

Yergeau, Melanie. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2018.

Notes Commented [MOU9]: FOR ENDNOTE 2 THERE IS NO

DOI . This material came from a call for papers.

1
Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York Deleted: New¶
York University
University Press, 2000), back cover.

2
“CFP: Identity and the Self: Personal Identity, Autonomy, and Belonging” for the Formatted: Normal, Line spacing: Double
Deleted: CFP,
6th Euroacademia International Conference “Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt

Collective Identities”, 22 – 23 June 2017, Florence, Italy. https://networks.h- Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
Bold

net.org/node/15741/discussions/175270/cfp-identity-and-self-personal-identity-autonomy-and-

belonging. Accessed 31 December 2019. Deleted: IABA Europe,¶

Deleted: accessed September 17, 2018, http://iaba-

europe.eu/news. <AU: Please provide the conference title
3 and place it was held, and dates, and please provide if
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
possible a stable doi instead of an unstable url.>…
Formatted: Normal
Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 8.
Deleted: Books
4
Mary Douglas, “The Person in an Enterprise Culture,” in Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes

in the Work of Mary Douglas, ed. Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Angus Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Deleted: s

University Press, 1992), 41–62.

5
William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1890), II xvii–43. Deleted: -
Formatted: Font: Not Italic
6
Eduardo Lerro, “Some Dark Interiority: A Brief Conceptual History,” in Inventing Agency: Deleted: H.

Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, ed. Claudia Brodsky and Deleted: s

Eloy LaBrada (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 30.

7
Lerro, “Some Dark Interiority,” 38. Deleted: Eduardo

8
John Locke, “Of Identity and Diversity,” in An Essay Concerning Human Deleted: Chapter XXVII:

Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin Classics, 1997), 296-314. Deleted: 8
Deleted: pages?.
9
See Eric T. Olson, “Personal Identity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Deleted: 357

Zalta (Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Summer 2017),

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/identity-personal/. <AU: Can you provide a stable Formatted: Font: Bold, Highlight

doi, instead of an unstable url?> NO Formatted: Font: Bold

10
Marshall Brown, “I Think, Therefore I Feel,” in Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and

Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, ed. Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada (New York: Deleted: s

Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 18.

11
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Formatted: Font: Not Italic

Press, 2008), 131.

12
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 142–170.

13
Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Deleted: Boca Raton:The

Press, 2007), 16–17.

14
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred Deleted: .
Deleted: Translated
A. Knopf, 2010), 283.
Deleted: by

15 Deleted: .
Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex,” Yale French Studies, 72
Formatted: Font: Italic

(1986): 37. Deleted: , Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century

Deleted: ,
16
Butler, “Sex and Gender.” Deleted: in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex

17
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 12.

18
Butler, Frames of War, 11. Deleted: Judith

19
Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (London: Routledge, 2000),

89.

20
Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 88. Deleted: Adriana

21
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed.

Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),

292.

22
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon

Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Julia Deleted: , and

Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia Deleted: The

University Press, 1982).

23
Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender,

Updated Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 44. Deleted: , With a New Preface

24
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006),

45.

25
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), 19.
26
Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2010), 2.

27
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 64.

28
Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 92. Deleted: Adriana

29
Butler, Giving an Account, 136. Deleted: Judith

30
Butler, Precarious Life, 35. Deleted: Judith

31
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 13. Deleted: Alexander G.

32
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 12. Deleted: Alexander G.

33
Françoise Lionnet, “Consciousness and Relationality: Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Beauvoir, and Deleted: .

Glissant,” Yale French Studies, 123 (2013): 116. Deleted: .

Formatted: Font: Not Italic
34
Butler, Giving an Account, 39. Deleted: , Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Deleted: Judith
35
Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada, eds., Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical

Production of the Modern Subject (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), back cover.

36
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3. Deleted: Alexander G.

37
Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist

Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 115–150. Deleted: .

38
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 2011), 3. Deleted: New York

39
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of Deleted: , CA

California Press, 1984), 29–30.

40
Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). Deleted: , MA

41
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 12. Deleted: Judith

42
Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5.

43
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8. Deleted: Alexander G.
44
Butler, Precarious Life, 45. Deleted: Judith

45
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2011).

46
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Books, 2010), 24.

47
Brown, “I Think,” 18. Deleted: Marshall

48
Angela Y. Davis, “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Racist,” in Women, Race, & Class (New Deleted: e,

York: Vintage, 1983), 190. Deleted: 172–201

49
Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,”

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (May 1997): 438–439. Deleted: .
Deleted: 4
50
Elizabeth R. Cole, “Intersectionality and Research in Psychology,” The American Psychologist 64, no. Deleted: (437–65)

3 (April 2009): 170–180.

51
Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2011), 94. Deleted: Books

52
Grosz, Becoming Undone, 89. Deleted: Elizabeth

53
Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press , 2007), 206. Deleted: Books

54
Jasbir Y. Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in

Assemblage Theory,” philoSOPHIA 2, no.1 (October 2012): 58. Deleted: (49–66)

55
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 2.

56
Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology,” Theory, Culture &

Society 23, nos.7–8 (December 2006): 201. Deleted: (197–208)

57
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: Deleted: N.

University of Chicago Press, 2005), 243.

58
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, ed.

Matthew Begelke (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 6.

59
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 44. Deleted: New York: Routledge

60
Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 46. Deleted: Sara
Deleted: The
61
Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 52–53. Deleted: of Emotion
Deleted: Sara
62
Chen, Mel Y., “Toxic Animacies, Intimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Deleted: The
Deleted: of Emotion
Studies 17, nos. 2-3 (2011), 278.
Formatted: Indent: Left: 0.02"

<AU: This should be a endnote from Chen, cited in Ahmed. Is that correct?, or should it Deleted: Cited in Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, 278. …
just be an endnote citing Chen?>INCORRECT. I CHANGED ENTRY Formatted: Font: Bold, Highlight
Formatted: Font: Bold, Highlight
63
Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Durham, NC: Formatted: Font: Bold, Highlight
Formatted: Indent: Left: 0.02"
Duke University Press, 2018), 11.

<AU: This should be a endnote from Yergau, cited in Ahmed. Is that correct?, or should it Deleted: Cited in Sara Ahmed,
Deleted: The
just be an endnote citing Yergau? Incorrect. I changed the entry.> Deleted: Cultural Politics of Emotion, 11.

64
Yergeau, Authoring Autism, 26. <AU: This should be a footnote from Yergeau, cited in Deleted: Cited in Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, …
Ahmed. Is that correct?, or should it just be an endnote citing Yergau?> INCORRECT.

I changed the entry.

65
Puar, “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg,” 62. Deleted: Jasbir

66
Hertha D. Sweet Wong, “First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community in Native American

Women’s Autobiography,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie S. Smith and Deleted: s

Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 168–178. Deleted: The