Solidarity Wishes: A Cultural Analysis of Political Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Stalled States of Desire

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dc.contributor.advisorLuxton, Meg
dc.contributor.authorPelletier, Gary Lee
dc.date.accessioned2023-12-08T14:21:01Z
dc.date.available2023-12-08T14:21:01Z
dc.date.issued2023-12-08
dc.date.updated2023-12-08T14:21:00Z
dc.degree.disciplineGender, Feminist and Women's Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractSolidarity Wishes argues that political solidarity is prone to getting stuck inside of stalled states of desire, what I conceptualize as “wishes,” for contemporary Canadian and American settler neoliberal subjects. This project illustrates how solidarity wishes commonly act as rhetorical, strategic, and performative psychological devices. I theorize that an ethics – or mentality – of sovereignty that ideologically structures many of these subjects’ social, political, and institutional lives is largely to blame for solidarity’s trapping within wishes. By centering an analysis of political solidarity through the framework of desire I illuminate how solidarity wishes and their expressions can be harvested by both individuals and groups to achieve something other than solidarity itself, a practice I liken to the psychoanalytic concept of “substitutive satisfaction.” Furthermore, as a meditation on solidarity as an object of desire, this dissertation queries what happens in the affective spaces between thinking and doing, feeling and experiencing, wanting and getting. I analyze examples from politics, popular culture, personal experience, academia, and activism to make my arguments, and I rely on queer theory, feminist theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as my theoretical frameworks. This dissertation gestures toward the political possibilities of rescuing political solidarity from these ambivalent subjective orectic states of wishes. It defends the theory that solidarity, in its most basic sense, is nonsovereignty manifested in a feeling toward another subject, a feeling that can, and hopefully will, ignite into productive solidarity practices. Solidarity Wishes argues that subjects must embrace their interdependency and adopt an ethics of nonsovereignty in order to transition their stagnant solidarity wishes into genuine desires for sociopolitical change and feasible practices toward transformative justice.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/41589
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectGender studies
dc.subjectGLBT studies
dc.subjectWomen's studies
dc.subject.keywordsQueer theory
dc.subject.keywordsSolidarity
dc.subject.keywordsSovereignty
dc.subject.keywordsPolitical solidarity
dc.subject.keywordsCultural studies
dc.subject.keywordsNonsovereignty
dc.subject.keywordsSolidarity wishes
dc.subject.keywordsAffect theory
dc.subject.keywordsHashtag solidarity
dc.subject.keywordsAntisocial thesis
dc.subject.keywordsQueer antirelationality
dc.subject.keywordsFeminist theory
dc.subject.keywordsPsychoanalysis
dc.subject.keywordsPopular culture
dc.subject.keywordsTransformative justice
dc.subject.keywordsSocial justice
dc.subject.keywordsSociopolitical justice
dc.subject.keywordsMutual aid
dc.subject.keywordsDesire
dc.titleSolidarity Wishes: A Cultural Analysis of Political Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Stalled States of Desire
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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