CRASSH | Category trouble: an errant phenomenology of stigma and care

Convenor
Kelly Fagan Robinson (Department of Social Anthropology)
Speaker
Cheryl Mattingly (Aarhus University, Departments of Anthropology and Philosophy & University of Southern California, Department of Anthropology)
Abstract
Could an errant version of critical phenomenology help us see spaces of potentiality even in the grimmest circumstances? Could it help ‘defrost’ our understanding of a concept like stigma? Stigma theory foregrounds the work of social identity categories in creating shaming dramas. It is a very familiar - a too familiar - concept within critical theory. How to think it anew? To disturb its certainties? ‘Defrosting’ is a metaphor borrowed from Hannah Arendt. She pondered the problem that dominant political and moral concepts freeze when they become canonical. She asked: what kind of thinking is required to address this? Within the Black radical tradition, Glissant, Moten, Sharpe and others also raise Arendt’s problem, but from a more poetic direction. I suggest an errant critical phenomenology that builds upon this work but foregrounds ethnography’s ‘perplexing particulars.’ More concretely, I ask: How do African American mothers (and grandmothers) nourish personal and familial moments of potentiality that disturb normative expectations? How do they try to combat stigma by cultivating these moments, offering elsewhere worlds that live alongside, even within, ordinary life? My focus is on small domestic landscapes that interrupt the dominant sociopolitical order and its stigmatising gaze.