Resistance without subjects: friction and the non-representational geography of everyday resistance

This chapter looks at the question of resistance in light of current geographical approaches - informed by a range of posthumanist and non-representational theories - that aim to decentre the pre-individuated subject as a unit of social and political analysis. Through a discussion of different geographical treatments of gender variance and transition, it asks what kinds of politics might be enabled by emerging non-representational theories of subjectivity. Historically, identity has proven a powerful organising principle for activist and scholarly resistance to differential distributions of power, inequality and violence. An insistence on the fluidity and provisionality of identity, both in non-representational and in queer or trans theories, clearly has a liberatory impetus. Nevertheless, it has also at times served to negate the experience of those marginalised within orders of categorical identity, or to advance prescriptive programmes for what constitutes resistance (Stryker and Bettcher, 2016; Namaste, 2009). At the same time, the framing of majority identities as vulnerable has sometimes been mobilised against marginalised groups, as white supremacist, islamophobic, and trans-antagonistic movements have all demonstrated in recent years (Butler et al., 2016). This chapter explores this tension in relation to an empiric engagement with feminist responses to matters of gender variance and inclusion, drawing on the work of a small collective of which the author is a member. The work involves a series of participatory workshops addressing conflict within feminist spaces and communities. Rather than focus on oppositional forms of resistance, the workshops are designed to unsettle and disperse the affective force of ontological attachments to political identity concepts. Resistance is thereby conceived here not as a mode of confrontation but as a practice of vulnerability which opens up new spaces of possible relation among communities differently affected by related modes of oppression. Geographical engagements with ontologies of process and becoming have in recent decades prompted a shift from the subject to processes of subject-formation, conceived as necessarily emergent, distributed, and provisional (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 2008). Critics of this approach have questioned to what extent such a shift is able to support sustained and critical attention to issues of power and social difference, arguing that the horizontalising and universalising of difference may not adequately account for the differential vulnerability of individuals and identity-based groups (Simpson, 2017; Saldanha, 2016). This has created something of a lacuna between the micropolitical engagements of non-representational geographies, and the macropolitical analyses of identity-based critical geographies. When questions of identity become attached to the individuated subject, these attachments can turn marginalised bodies and lives into a battleground for conflicting political theories. Process ontologies, and non-representational theories in particular, can therefore do important work in the untethering of political geographies of subjectification from ontological attachments to identity. Realising this possibility, however, requires more than a self-consciously anti-identitarian application of non-representational conceits. This chapter argues that non-representational approaches offer much to critical geographies of resistance, but that this requires a commitment to sustained engagement with uncomfortable and persistent problems from which it has tended to distance itself.