In her timely book, Katie Oliviero explores the theoretical category of vulnerability, which bridges discourse and political affect to sometimes expose precarious and ungrievable lives, but more often creates social facts based on repeated claims of vulnerability in conservative circles. Her analysis rests on the idea that vulnerability may be a universal fact of life, but certain interlocutors aim to portray the socially produced vulnerability of women, the LGQBT community, undocumented immigrants, and racial minorities (and intersections of these groups) as individual and yet homogeneous. In doing so, they depoliticize and devalue the suffering and vulnerability of groups whose fate is bound up in an increasingly harsh state apparatus and neoliberal precarity. Vulnerability is not just a material referent in this book but is exposed as an ideological trigger, capturing a shifting set of emotions to provoke feelings of loss and a desire for unity among conservatives. The claim of vulnerability is deployed in a strangely intersectional and yet intellectually blind stance toward neighbors, coworkers, and foreigners in our midst.
Oliviero’s analysis of this subject includes case studies of the Minutemen (the vigilante group that has conceived of itself as an alternative border patrol), opponents of same-sex marriage, and antiabortion activists who claim that abortion is a form of genocide. Each of these groups identifies and strategizes around feelings of loss, precariousness, and victimhood, which they translate into “art exhibits,” protests, and advertisements. In doing so, they often buttress conservative state forces that seek to limit welfare, curb immigration, and deny women—especially poor women of color—access to prenatal health care and safe abortion services. That is, in discursively and normatively establishing their vulnerability, these conservative groups diminish the quality of life of marginalized groups even more.
The author treats these forms of power (i.e., disciplinary power and bio-power), however, as immanent and, therefore, something that progressive actors cannot reject but must work to challenge, alter, and reimagine. For this reason, she encourages progressive actors to study and draw on vulnerability technologies as a method of investigation, identification, and a way to construct a more inclusive vision of the future. In her fascinating but briefer account of Black Lives Matter at the end of the book, she explains how the group is a significant example of the positive reappropriation of vulnerability, recognizing it as a product of structural inequalities and static identities. Black Lives Matter not only “queers” vulnerability (p. 27), exploding fixed visions of the future and more positively drawing on “memory,” but wisely approaches its organization and campaigns in ways that draw on identity but avoid the essentialized claims of identity politics that can lead to competition among the dispossessed.
Oliviero draws on Michel Foucault’s analytics of disciplinary and bio-power and follows his genealogical approach in her work because “genealogy emphasizes the fissures and amnesias in the quest for origins, as much as the overlaps” (p. 24). In discussing immigration, gay rights, and reproductive policies through the vulnerability lens, she wants to “track how a set of affective politics that most obviously seem to generate support for the most precarious groups like refugees can be rerouted toward antidemocratic ends” (p. 24). In conceiving of vulnerability as a “theory in the flesh,” she brings together intersectional work, including early but important work by Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others, connecting it to Foucault’s and, sometimes, Agamben’s work on power. To Oliviero, these authors help us to identify feelings of denigration and precariousness while also recognizing the “transformative power” of acknowledging “the affective realm” as a “site of knowledge” (p. 25).
While I appreciate Oliviero’s use of this literature, I would have liked to know more about how she felt that these authors—who, she notes, are often accused of identifying victimization but are unable to provide solutions, particularly in solidarity with other oppressed groups—connected to Foucault’s and Agamben’s work, as both authors (rightly or wrongly) have been criticized as being overly Euro-centric and relatively blind to race, gender, and class. The feminists of color literature is also a constant thread throughout Vulnerability Politics, while the bio-political analyses of Foucault and Agamben are briefer and less sustained. Nevertheless, the combination of authors is an interesting one and an important reminder to some political theorists that what counts as “American Political Thought” can and should be expanded to include these very important voices.
Oliviero’s in-depth theorization of intersectionality is particularly important as she provides substantial insights into this term and its misapplication. This approach is sorely needed in the still largely androgynous literature on immigration. The author goes beyond merely applying the term to deeply interrogating how groups like the Minutemen draw on embodied, performative actions and affective slogans in order to identify forms of intersectional vulnerability embedded in current migration pathways and border processes, but also to project these moves inward so that certain groups representing the national “self” become the victims, the invaded, and the dispossessed.
The book is—in my opinion—overly long, and the ending is oddly abrupt, even if each subject is also thoroughly investigated. While there is some repetition in the Minuteman section, I found the other case studies more informative and less repetitive with excellent analyses throughout. While the placement of the chapter on Black Lives Matter was a bit odd (it is the final chapter) because the penultimate chapter seemed to be the conclusion, it is also worth reading for any political scientist interested in the democratic techniques and campaigns of this group, which avoid problematic invocations of identity politics and yet identify vulnerability specifically—for example, in the #sayhername and the Black Girls Matter campaigns. The fact that Black Lives Matter is able to rechannel vulnerability technologies and claims to advance causes of social justice is evidence that in a context of inequality, resistance is possible.
Oliviero does slip into more despairing language, however. For example, in discussing Freddy Gray, whose extrajudicial murder inspired the movement, she concludes that police vandalism of a memorial to him evidences that his life was ungrievable and that his death “literally did not matter” (p. 264). But this is not true—the flower memorial would not have been created if no one mourned. This raises a debate many of us are working on: Can bare life, precarity, and/or vulnerability be revalued without some cost? Freddy Gray’s life consisted of more than the circumstances around his death. In viewing his death as not mattering, are we not participating in the sort of politics—a politics engaged in species thinking—that we seek to challenge? Even as attention to the politics of the body and affect challenge the historical dichotomy between ordered rationality and disorderly passion, should the political be defined at the level of the body, or do we risk participating in a narrow view of political possibilities if it is? Do we not lose something by reducing politics to bio-power/vulnerability even if it is deployed for progressive causes?
Regardless of these questions, this excellent and thought-provoking book helps us understand urgent questions today—particularly about antidemocratic groups whose voices seem to drown out the words of those most affected by vulnerability.
