“States of injury”

In her recent collection of essays, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), Wendy Brown argues that Western liberal political constituencies, feminists among them, have often protested against exclusion from the universal category of citizen by insisting on their “wounded attachments” to the nation-state as the basis for civic participation. In this tradition, it is not simply powerlessness but the pain of marginalization and disenfranchisement which has served as the foundation for critiques of universalism and claims to justice in the public sphere. ² Brown’s thoughtful reading of how power, freedom and resistance are imagined in late modernity (and especially under liberal bureaucratic regimes) insists not just that modern feminism is part of the western liberal tradition, but that some of its strategies for political inclusion are characteristic, if not constituent, of that tradition — thus re-establishing feminism in the domain of politics rather than relegating it to the sphere of the social or even the cultural, and suggesting its complicity with normalizing regimes of power like the patriarchal nation-state. What remains underexplored in Brown’s theoretical framework is the extent to which ostensibly autonomous political communities and actors have historically relied on the injuries of “others” to (re-) focus the attention of the state on their own desire for inclusion in the body politic. This is perhaps because for Brown, the genealogy of modern Western liberalism and its affiliates is only implicitly, rather than expressly, colonial – a limitation I would like to take advantage of in order to lend some historical depth to her argument and contribute to ongoing conversations about how and under what specific historical and cultural conditions British feminists used the opportunities provided by empire to seek citizenship in the Victorian polity.