Cultural Politics and the Practice of Fugitive Theory
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Cultural Politics and the Practice of Fugitive Theory Samuel A. Chambers Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Swansea, Wales, James Callaghan Building, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 9–32. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300177 Keywords: cultural politics; theory; practice; fugitive; disciplinarity
Introduction 12 October 2003 marked the fifth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death. Shepard may be the most prominent victim of an anti-gay hate crime, as he was tied to a fence in an open field, beaten severely by two men, and then left for dead. After 18 hours in freezing temperatures he was found by passing motorcyclists who first mistook him for a scarecrow. He died 5 days later.1 President George W. Bush commemorated the anniversary of Shepard’s brutal murder by launching ‘Marriage Protection Week’ (Presidential Proclamation, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/10/20031003-12.html)2 — a response, as the Marriage Protection Week website (http://www.marriageprotectionweek.com, accessed on 3 November 2003) tells its viewers in large italics, to the notion that ‘the sacred institution of marriage is under
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attack’. Apparently, the battle (some battle) is on. Just 3 months earlier, in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the US supreme court declared anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional, reversing the 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), a landmark case that had effectively stripped gay and lesbian Americans of their basic civil rights. In his dissent, Justice Scalia scolded the court for effectively ‘tak[ing] sides in the culture war’. Scalia and his fellow justices h
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