States of Injury

Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

Bibliographic Data

ID20429274
AuthorsWendy Brown (0000-0002-5309-3381, corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages219
Publication date2020-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueStates of Injury (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPrinceton University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1515/9780691201399
OpenAlexW2079847354
ISBN9780691201399
Open LibraryOL34136099M
LanguageEN
Citations received1,037

in characterizing Catherine MacKinnon's theory of gender as itself pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its promises, this text pursues a central question: how does a sense of woundedness become basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize state: such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of governmental protection. Whether one is dealing with state, Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands, writes Brown, the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by protector's rules. True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection. Refusing any facile identification with one political position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics, from basis of litigiousness in political life to appearance on academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power. These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and political li

academic left · Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Catherine MacKinnon · Democracy · Dependency · Harm · Hate speech · Identity (music) · identity construction · injuries · Law and economics · Liberalism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · pornography regulation · Power (physics) · Revenge · Sociology · State (computer science) · state power · victimhood · Agriculture and Farm Safety · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender and Feminist Studies · Gun Ownership and Violence Research · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Medicine · Memory, violence, and history · Philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Traumatic Brain Injury Research