De-construction and the pursuit of freedom

 I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to deconstruct historical events and terms. For a couple of months in 2022 I however went through a crisis as a researcher. Since the pursuit of my studies have been to pave the way for social change and thus increasing social liberty, I came to ask myself how my research would connect to an overall social change. What was worse was that as I was grappling with this problem, I had no solution. 

Let's start with the obvious. From the school of discourse were I take my point of departure language is seen as an immensely powerful tool both for social control and social change. Through the use of language we exercise controll by creating policies that according to Bacchi is dependent on social categories. Categorization is on my understanding the process in which we align meaning to abstract terms, such as foreigners, gays and the poor. By aligning meaning to these groups we constitutes them and thus create the possibility to socially intervene on the groups.

Perhaps this is most clear in the debate of dragqueens that have hit hard both in the US and Sweden. During the last years populist politicians have described dragqueens as sexualizing children by dragqueen story hour and as a threat to understand gender roles. By looking at the language used by the populists we can see how they shape a category and by de-constructing the underlying assumptions made, the populist framing becomes possible to critize. 

Francis Leon - one of the first known 
dragqueens. Picture from Wikipedia. 


In my own line of thought during 2022 I had however stopped at the notion of deconstructing, thus lacking the possibility to form a social critique towards the policy. Furthermore, an important question was if this was really the historians task. Stemming from the positivist view, it would not be science if I were to take a political stance. This was a moment of crisis for me, until I went to a lecture by Jack Hallberstam.

What Hallberstam did was not to take a stand towards the possibility of being an historian and a activist. Instead Hallberstam put forward that the academics work was to de-construct reality in order to show how it is based on assumptions. The aim was not to create social changes by the studies themselves, but rather to put forward how social conditions were the result not of an objective but subjective reality. Thereby, a de-constructivist approach enables decision makers to think differently and ask themselves the question of how things would have been if the original assumptions were made otherwise.

I will always be an activist at heart. For me society is in dire need of change. Humanity knows better and can therefore do better, I am a strong optimist in that way. But being an activist and partaking in demonstrations is only one of my ways to change the world. My research is rather about speaking truth to power, and thus making it possible for it to critically reflect on its own practices. What these reflections then leads to should be decided by the public, either in elections or activism.

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