Amia Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…Let me try another read on your work. This occurred to me when I read Judith Butler’s very good review of your book. It struck me that you’re, I think, quite a bit more libertarian — small-l libertarian — than the mainstream gives you credit for. This comes out of your view on sex workers. You’re trying to rebuild some new kind of utopian libertarianism, based not on capitalism. You see the vanguard here as trans individuals who — precisely because, to so many people, it’s shocking — represent something that is new and breaking down a hierarchy. That trans is fundamental to your notion of how to undo previous hierarchies, which are anything but emancipatory, and to rebuild the foundations of some noncapitalistic libertarianism on this idea of ambivalence, complexity, and context, and the sense of novelty, difference, diversity, even shock, from the trans movement, and those are your new foundations. Again, I’m not the canonical source here, but how would you respond to that? I think that’s interesting. I think you’ve absolutely identified a strain in my thinking, which I’d be tempted to call anarchic more than libertarian. That’s fine, yes.…

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