Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change by Charles Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change by Charles Lee Elias Rodriques Lee, Charles. 2016. Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $25.95 sc. 298 pp. Charles Lee's Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change is a well-researched book that will prove important for theorists of social change, political agency, and social movements. Lee begins by critiquing the premises that undergird the common conception of political agency as "a capacity to act politically in ways that are public and collective" (3). Whereas most scholars associate democratic agency with liberalist thought, Lee contends that radical political thinkers conceive of political agency in the same way. According to Lee, the liberal and radical assumption that political agency is democratic agency becomes the assumption that political agency ought to be democratic agency. This slide from descriptive to normative, and the consequential valorization of democratic agency, ultimately denigrates other kinds of political action and agency, retracts the horizon of what we conceive of as political, and obscures potential models for radical transformation. To critique the valorization of democratic agency, Lee studies the political actions of marginalized subjects who exercise "political agency" through "deliberate subjection" to the state as a means of gaining their ends (5–6). Analyzing these subjections as exemplary of new routes for political change, Lee critiques the traditional model [End Page 751] of social justice and transformation, which describes both as "critical of and oppositional to . . . the structural conditions of injustice" (8). Against this model's depiction of social justice movements as transcendent, Lee foregrounds these marginalized actors' subjection as a means of insisting that social justice movements are immanent to the conditions of injustice which they seek to change. Change, Lee argues, is always already immanent to liberal modernity and the capitalist world system. This is, according to Lee, a secret abject subjects already know and a premise from which those subjects work. To understand how the strategies of abject subjects are significant to radical visions of change, Lee develops a method he terms "critical contextualization," which uses interdisciplinary methods to center the everyday actions of abject subjects, interpret them from the perspective of the abject subject, and expand our conception of political agency. Lee's method, which borrows heavily from anthropology, aims to expand our understanding of the potential means for producing change within liberal capitalist modernity. In particular, Lee focuses on political agency as gained or enacted through modes of citizenship. For Lee, citizenship is not a static object but a "cultural script" produced by "liberal sovereignty to govern and regulate how citizen-subjects should conduct themselves in different realms of social life" (26). The importance of defining citizenship as a cultural script arises when abject-subjects denied the benefits of citizenship act with the titular "ingenious citizenship" and find means of writing themselves "into the script" to acquire their desired ends (27). In so doing, they deliberately subject themselves to the state's citizen-forming processes to find means of surviving. Lee's examples are migrant domestic workers, sex workers, trans people, and suicide bombers. His analyses of ethnographies of domestic workers are especially illuminative. For instance, he writes of a domestic servant who cut and refused to bandage her finger while ironing. Fearing further bloodstains on their clothes, the employer eased the domestic servant's workload that day. In this and other instances, ingenious agency provides "a contingent and momentary change—if not a shift of power, at least some breathing room—in their immediate confinement" (64). In his chapter on sex workers, Lee analyzes an episode of the internet show The Skyy John Show, interpreting one sex worker who works indoors denigrating those who work "on the streets" as abjecting one kind of sex worker's [End Page 752] work in order to credit her own. In so doing, she foregrounds "that the cultural script of liberal economic citizenship is not totally fixed but contains gaps that allow it to be reshaped" (106). Lee insists that moments like these harbor the potential for rewriting relations amongst people and changing liberal capitalism. Lee's chapter on trans people further grounds his analysis within two traditional domains...