I haven’t been thinking about the US very much. That is kind of the point of what I’m doing. But I still feel like I should be out there crying foul at every Supreme Court ruling, every moment of enraging, disappointing, crushing erosion of civil society.
I’ve been at the American Academy in Berlin, which is on the Wannsee Lake, in fact just across that lake from the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held—yes, that one. And one of the thing that strikes me about this coincidence is that there is a way that isolation from the real world—like being on this idyllic lake rather than in the bustle of Berlin, allows one to act and think as if the world were not in fact there, but an abstraction, an experiment. What I mean is: the distance provided by the idyll allows men to make decisions that affect the real world, precisely because they imagine themselves as not being in that world. Or this is the thought that I had while being in the actual building where the Wannsee conference was held. I don’t know, perhaps the idea is that terrible decisions are often the result of abstraction, separation from the world. Men need isolation in order to plan the holocaust. Men need separation in order to divest themselves from the bodies, the personhood of those they are about to destroy.
This has been a conference about gender, so of course Roe v Wade has been a topic of discussion, but also the rise and expansion of anti-gender “gender ideology” movements across the world (especially Latin America). And one of the connections, which came out in the group discussion, is to the erosion of civil society (at least in the US) as a result of a decades-long conservative strategy not to replace one set of civil codes for another, but to dismantle the entire civil infrastructure so that legal protections, even when enacted (i.e. gender identity laws) do not carry with them a method of enforcement or enactment, and so end up as mere exercise in political theory, rather than actual forms of civil protection. What takes the place of civil society when there are no mechanisms to ensure or even to imagine what it means to have a certain set of rights? Of course, another issue that came up is the limitations of certain civil and human rights discourses. (For we who have not always been “human” this is obvious, but it was good to have the discussion.)
At any rate, the question is how to respond to the erosion of civil society when the last decades have privatized care, but also the enforcement of the very laws that, even when in place never protected us, but which now are not only being eroded, but actively transferred to the hands of non-state actors. Think of the Texas law that deputizes anyone to turn in a person who has or is seeking an abortion. The issue there is not only that the law does not protect you, but that anyone can be the law, anyone can be the surveillance mechanism of the law. That’s the fucked up part.
The core lesson that I am taking away from the conference is that we have come to a point in the world where progressive legal mechanisms for the protection of rights, while important, are only ever first steps (or second or third) toward a gradual re-establishment of a society that aims not just to protect vulnerable people, but to create a societal change that no longer requires that those protections be enshrined as laws in the first place. The law will never set us free, but we also cannot imagine that refusing to engage with the law will enhance or save our freedom.
That second part is important because for me, I often feel like I don’t have any real investment in legal praxis. I don’t often imagine that “the law” is a place where I can think or where I feel like my thought and action will make any sense. But I realized, being with some of the people who actually wrote Argentina’s Gender Identity law, that the law is one of many avenues of political action, and the drafting of laws can actually be the expression of broad social change, broad coalition based action, rather than the purview of some bureaucrat and their underlings. I’m not saying I want to go out and help draft new laws, but rather that the expression of our desires for a world free of violence, this abolitionist, decolonial future, will require both the management of legal mechanisms, and broad coalition-based methods of enacting the alternatives to neoliberal, fascism as it is being expressed across the world today (but especially in the US).
Maybe the takeaway is this: the law will not set you free, but not because it doesn’t actually have the power to do that, but rather because your freedom never was predicated on the legal infrastructure in the first place. It was always in desire that this change will come about. In desire and in collective forms of imbrication and entanglement.