Strategic Essentialism & The Problem of Political Belonging

In this video, I explore the concept of political belonging and try to show the paradox at the heart of it by examining a commonly employed strategy called strategic essentialism. CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR THE CREATIVE NOTHING ZINE (PRINT EDITION): https://thecreativenothing.substack.c... VIDEO CHAPTERS: 0:01Introduction 2:38 What Is Strategic Essentialism? 9:19 Why The Fiction Sticks (Psychology of the Binary) 14:33 Case Study I: Contrapoints and the Problem of Ambiguity 20:40 Case Study II: Early Black Lives Matter and Strategic Exclusion 24:57 Intermission I: The Fact of Blackness (Fanon) 28:51 Intermission II: Political Neurosis (Freud & Lacan) 33:23 Theoretical Developments 35:15 The Trap: When Strategy Cannot Be Turned Off 40:20 The Egoist Moment MY WORK (mentioned in the video): On the Contradictory Desire for Legitimation in Psychological and Cultural Liberation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w... The Synthesis of Social Media Dialectics and the Rise of Alt-Right Memes. Conference paper, 2019: https://philarchive.org/rec/BRUTSO-15 Strategic Essentialism Description: https://www.literatureandcriticism.co... SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: PATREON:   / join   YOUTUBE:    / @unspookedproject   DONATE: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted... REFERENCES: (these links are affiliate links - if you make a purchase using my links, I receive a commission payment via the Affiliate program - however, many of the texts can be found online): Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own: https://amzn.to/4cTxtXs or https://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra... Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971: https://www.marxists.org/reference/ar... Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990: https://amzn.to/4fJ2AYL Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]: https://monoskop.org/images/a/a5/Fano... Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977: https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Fouc... Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [1921]: https://ia802907.us.archive.org/17/it... Garza, Alicia. “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014: https://defendinged.org/wp-content/up... Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988: https://amzn.to/444EFf8 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991: https://amzn.to/4fCvGJj Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2001 [1985]: https://files.libcom.org/files/ernest... Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Black Orpheus.” In What Is Literature? and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1948]: https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/... Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988: https://amzn.to/4gfpffo Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Spivak Reader. Edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. New York: Routledge, 1996: https://amzn.to/4eq5ZJT Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “In a Word: Interview.” Differences 1, no. 2 (1989): 124–156: https://www.ikhtyar.org/wp-content/up... Hogg, Michael A. Uncertainty-Identity Theory: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... Tajfel, Henri. Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981: https://amzn.to/4eEWzLG