“'Only Your Labels Split Me’: Epistemic Privilege, Boundaries, and Pretexts of ‘Religion,’” Intertexts (2021).

‘Religion’ as an epistemology justifies powerful borders between people. Constructed in the European Enlightenment as a sui generis universal institution reflecting an epistemic frame, ‘Religion’ has served as an almost unassailable pretext for violence on the basis of insurmountable divisions between people from the proto-Globalization of European imperialism to contemporary neo-imperialism. 

This article offers a framework for understanding how the construction of ‘Religion’ as an epistemology serves to construct powerful privilege-justifying borders between people that justify violence from individual to transnational levels. Engaging Gloria Anzaldúa's theorization of borders, the article illustrates the argument with literary, historical, and contemporary examples, from justifications of slavery Frederick Douglass condemns to recent European niqab bans citing secular ideals to forbid symbols of secularism’s “binary twin,” ‘Religion.’

Keywords: Religion, imperialism, pretext, modern, Gloria Anzaldúa, niqab, epistemology, borders

“Queer theory,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (2021).

Queer theory describes a network of critiques emerging from a legacy of activism and looking ahead to utopian futures. The analytical tools queer theory provides as a mode of close reading and critique makes it a relevant contemporary approach to literary theory. Beyond reading for queer characters and desires in texts, queer theory is a tool for seeing below the superficial, and supporting unconventional readings that deconstruct normative assumptions. The activist roots of queer theory in the 1969 Stonewall Riots places drag, trans issues, class, race, violence, gender, and sexuality at the heart of queer theorizing. Subsequent work engages topics such as temporality, ecology, geography, and diaspora through the analysis of culture and politics, but also literature, film, music, and other media. Queer theory attends to both the rhetorical power of language and the broader structures of knowledge formulation. As feminist epistemology asks whose knowledge matters and who creates knowledge, queer theory asks whether knowledge matters and whether naturalized knowledge is constructed. Textual or discursive construction of knowledge is a key theoretical approach of queer theory with important implications for literature. Queer theory embraces a multidisciplinary and diverse set of influences, methodologies, questions, and formats. The critiques can be applied to help deconstruct naturalized epistemic frameworks around topics notably including, language, gender, sexuality, history, the subject, universality, the environment, animals, borders, space, time, norms, ideals, reproduction, utopia, love, the home, the nation, and power. Queer theory empowers novel readings of the world, and worldly readings of the novel, opening up new ways of viewing life and text.

Keywords: queer theory, critical theory, critique, ecology, geography, temporality, diaspora, rhetoric, gender, sexuality

“Conquering Love: Failed Xenophilia in Brian Friel’s Translations,” Common Knowledge (2020).

In a contribution to a symposium on xenophilia, this essay — a study of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations — raises the question of whether all xenophilia is by nature doomed to fail. Set in Ireland in 1833, the drama centers on the tension arising from a young British lieutenant’s falling in love with an Irish-speaker while he is in her country to translate Irish place-names into English for an imperial cartographic survey. While the lieutenant is referred to in the play as a Hibernophile, the essay interprets his love as xenophilic: love for the foreignness rather than the Irishness of what he encounters. The lieutenant’s love of foreign places and their names impedes his effort to systematize Ireland for imperial ends, and his love for an Irish woman brings about his own undoing. Applying Simone de Beauvoir’s view of alterity to the lieutenant’s xenophilia, the essay questions whether the English written over the Irish in this play and the lieutenant’s desire written over the objects of his love obscure enough of the other’s otherness to render his xenophilia no longer viable.

Keywords: xenophilia, translation theory, Irish drama, Brian Friel, Simone de Beauvoir

"Coronavirus pandemic is putting civil liberties at risk," The Irish Times (2020).

Amid the panic, governments worldwide are responding to Covid-19 by instituting measures that limit civil liberties. Irish politicians recently passed two Bills granting the Government expanded powers, including to prohibit movement and assembly. As of yesterday the gardaí have the power to tell people to return to their home or face prosecution. Our intuitions about which new limits on liberty are reasonable and just sacrifices to make in the interest of our fellow humans depend on a range of factors, from trust in government and technology to our political, moral and economic values. [...]
In chaos, it is even more important to have a framework for evaluating new developments. We can examine whether new measures are trustworthy or suspect by evaluating whether the justifications for the measure reflect valid motivations or are Machiavellian pretexts. There are several tests one can use to evaluate the trustworthiness of governments’ justifications for enacting measures limiting civil liberties.

Keywords: pretext, covid-19, pandemic