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Gender, Labor, & Law with Emma Caterine
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Maxximilian Seijo: Related to what you were talking about with fashion, before we wrap up here, I wanted to ask you about your criticisms of what you call the "aesthetic politics of the neoliberal era" and how feminist or queer theory has integrated that into their praxis? And also, maybe to ponder if you, despite that criticism, still see a place for aesthetics in the future of socialist politics and governance?
Emma Caterine: Yeah, absolutely. The problem with modern aesthetic politics is not the use of aesthetics or any use of aesthetics. The internet age pretty much mandates that we engage in extensive construction of aesthetics. We want it to be relevant to modern politics. Aesthetics is one of the primary methods of communication. To boil it down to a very simple function, you got to get people to click on the link. In DSA, [aesthetics] are one of the things that we do really well that a lot of socialists don't do well. We're really good at branding. We've got that swag. But the issue is that aesthetics have been accepted as a political totality. All that matters is we craft our individual political image and presence. And so, the work of building power collectively and the work of governing publicly is inconsequential.
Intersectionality in particular has become aestheticized to the point that people, like Hillary Clinton, can use it without any sense of irony. As Hillary Clinton is, both in terms of the policies she supported and then of course her own personal life, everything that intersectionality advocates against. It doesn't matter what her underlying politics are or whether or not those are intersectional in the realm of aesthetic politics. It only mattered that she was able to craft this aesthetic of intersectionality. What I try to point out to people is this: who do you think is better at crafting these sort of glitzy, nice aesthetics? Is it going to be a ragtag band of leftists? Or is it going to be these corporations who already have multimillion dollar advertisement and infrastructures already set up? I hope I don't even have to answer that question.
Now, that's not to belie that there is some great leftist stuff out there. That one film company that's been doing all of the campaign ads for Alexandria and others—I think they're called Means of Production—they're great. But I have been thinking about these things for a long time. I think one person that really jumpstarted my thinking was the Nigerian feminist, Obioma Nnaemeka. She characterized this aesthetic politics by saying that intersectionality had become stuck in ontological considerations, meaning intersectionality had become focused on whether someone was being intersectional. And so, she said that feminists needed to shift towards a functional imperative of intersectionality, or quite simply to ask, "Okay, well, what are we going to do?"
That's why I'm so focused on things like a Jobs Guarantee. Because I've worked with so many types of people in my life. People in prison, transgender people, sex workers, food service workers—they all have their own issues. But the one intersection they all met at was labor and the economy. And, to be clear, that's what intersectionality was originally meant to talk about. Kimberly Crenshaw, the woman who coined the term, coined it in the context of talking about employment discrimination against black women. But for a whole host of reasons, which I talk about in my aesthetic politics series, it got so twisted that it could be easily co-opted by the very same capitalist hegemony it was supposed to fight against. So I'm not against aesthetics. We just need to recognize that politics has to be more than crafting an aesthetic. It has to be more than looking radical and having a very radical social media presence. It involves gritty, boots-to-the-ground work building collective power.
Emma Caterine is a law graduate and writer with more than a decade of experience working within economic justice, feminist, LGBTQ, and racial justice movements.
