ABSTRACT
This book is about the figuration of power in its multiple modalities. It is an attempt to grapple with the intersectionality across some of these modalities: class, gender, ‘race’ and racism, ethnicity, nationalism, generation and sexuality. It is part of my ongoing struggle to find ways of thinking about the relationship between and across these distinctive fields of power as they are played out in the constitution and transformation of social relations, subjectivity and identity. Each of these constructs-class, gender, racism…—signifies a specific type of power relation produced and exercised in and through a myriad of economic, political and cultural practices. The previous chapters have been concerned with the kinds of inclusion or exclusion sanctioned by specific articulations of power. They have concerned the question of how power is exercised through specific state policies, structures and modes of governance. They address what types of subject positions, subjectivities and identities are constructed and contested within the interstices of particular configurations of power. And they explore what kinds of politics are inscribed, and what forms of fantasies, desires, ambivalences and contradictions are performed in, through or by particular dynamics of power. In all this, the key question underpinning my attempts at analysis has been: ‘How are realms -that we heuristically define as cultural, economic, political, psychic or social-marked, reinscribed or transgressed in varying operations of power?’
