The Conservative Playbook: A Lightning Round Session on Right-Wing Rhetoric

This paper takes interest in the converging discourse surrounding a perceived 'great American sexlessness' from two seemingly incompatible sides: right-wing pronatalists on the one hand, and sex-positive progressives on the other. Over the past few years, countless studies and op-eds have explored the now widely-accepted notion that generation Z is not having sex, a reverse kind of moral panic which turns deprioritizing sex into a diagnosis of puritanism and stokes pronatalist fears of declining birthrates. What sets of cultural anxieties do these twinned discourses articulate? And how is religion differentially wielded to the same end? While articulating very different political orientations, I argue, both pleas to have more sex index a cruelly optimistic set of shared national fantasies rooted in the goods attributed to sex and sexual desire, and the formations of whiteness, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness which subtend them. 

“Wokeism” as a term enters the U.S cultural lexicon at a moment of 21st century racial reckoning, and it is the concept of racial/cultural reckoning that continually shapes its lexical field. While liberals/progressives describe “wokeism” as a movement towards global liberation, conservatives describe “wokeism” as representative of the inherent problems of a liberal political order.

In this lightening paper, I think through and with “wokeism” using Saidiya Hartman’s "Position of the Unthought" and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in conversation with 90s Hip Hop Thanatologies. Hartman's work refuses hopeful solutions to the reality of an antiblack world while documenting illegible and anarchic means of Black survival. Meanwhile, thanatologies of 90s hip hop provide a variegated field to understand “woke” on different registers. Taaken together, I highlight how "wokeism" as code for “multi-cultural equity” not only sustains an antiblack world, but ignores the phrase's operationalization as a “wayward” means of survival. 

Ironically, by diving into the ideological commitments inherent within "Gender Ideology," queer individuals can create more room for self-understanding and authenticity.

By stripping the medico-juridical insinuations that intentionally stoke fear, exploring the social interconnectivity of queer identities recenters "social contagion" in a way that uncovers new ways of being while prioritizing agency and joy over imposed normativity and alleged immutability.

"Theory" is a key buzzword in right-wing discourses on higher education and its discontents, often serving as the link stringing together these discourses' visions of a wide range of intellectual and pedagogical projects (gender theory, critical race theory, etc.). State legislatures around the country have passed or are considering bills that explicitly identify "theory" as that which must be banned from the academy and from public life. It is clear that this work does significant rhetorical work for the right today—but why? What does "theory" signify and why does this signification incite a phobic reaction? I offer a brief history of anti-"theory" discourse in US media and politics since 1970, a diagnosis of this discourse's phobic symptoms and political objectives, and a critical argument in defense of "theory."

This paper thinks queerly about “social contagion” vis-à-vis postwar theologies of the family. Drawing on archival materials, I trace how the rise of pastoral psychology within the theological academy was, on the one hand, a response to homosexual panic: early issues of Pastoral Psychology reveal persistent anxieties about the family and the figure of the homosexual. On the other hand, its diagnostic vocabularies provided new language to articulate previously inchoate sexual desires. I argue that pastoral psychology—and practical theology more broadly—spread fears and fantasies that reshaped how theology students thought about sex and the family in postwar America, prompting new and unintended political possibilities. Queer/trans contagion moved precisely through the theories and methods meant to quarantine it. This history of pastoral psychology demonstrates how contemporary anxieties surrounding “social contagion” might paradoxically generate the very political movements they aim to inoculate in the name of “family" or "the child."

“Toxin-free” is a central marketing buzzword within the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and political imaginary. The word functions as a secular liturgy of purity, while obscuring a deregulatory agenda. This very short paper thinks against the hypocrisy of a MAHA vision for a toxin-free America by turning toward a different archive: the queer-led farm. By treating the queer farm as a living archive and moral framework, this paper challenges the MAHA obfuscation of policy that leads to mass debilitation. I will demonstrate how queer-led agriculture reclaims "toxin-free" as a rigorous, shared practice of environmental and social care.