Liberal Tolerance Research Articles

The United States safe space campus controversy and the paradox of freedom of speech

The article examines a remarkable paradox between the overwhelming public view supporting free speech as a principle, as attested by specific polls about the issue, and the fact that most people require establishing boundaries on certain types of speech. Particularly, while American society seems to openly accept free speech and even hate speech, the new generation of America requires ‘safe spaces’ without offensive speech. This paradox seems to be a blow to the liberal position regarding freedom of speech, specifically to the principle of tolerance. John Milton’s call for liberal tolerance based on Voltaire’s enlightened conception is explored in contrast to the classical understanding.

"As long as they behave themselves": Heterosexual recuperation in South Africans' talk about homosexuality

Several qualitative researchers using discursive methodologies have noted how opposition to homosexuality has not necessarily diminished, despite the general expression of liberal tolerance in many settings. Instead, heterosexist rhetoric has shifted to accommodate political change. Our research builds on this observation within the South African context, using a discursive psychology approach. We examine rhetorical strategies of "heterosexual recuperation": the ways that heterosexual boundaries and the dominance of heterosexuality are maintained by speakers, at the same time as they attempt to avoid being heard as heterosexist. Drawing on data from a qualitative study conducted with heterosexual-identifying Black South Africans (32) from four provinces, we focus on talk that was resourced by a "discourse of tolerance" and characterised by speakers' concern to avoid the attribution of heterosexism. This talk was analysed using thematic analysis, to which discursive psychology techniques were applied. We identified two ways of speaking that relied on this discourse - (1) "As long as they do it in private", and (2) "Flashing their homosexuality" - and show how they ultimately worked to recuperate heterosexuality and marginalise non-normative sexualities. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to a critical psychology that works to challenge hetero-patriarchal norms.

Five Tourniquets and a Ship's Bell: The Special Session at the 1931 Congress

A mythology surrounds the 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. The event is portrayed as a calm and learned gathering where political dispassion and liberal tolerance towards the Soviet delegation were the order of the day. This is, in fact, a myth circulated by some of the participants who wanted to gloss over the conflict that actually characterized the congress. The notion finds its apex in the events surrounding the Special Session that is often positioned as the platform created for the Russians to deliver their papers. This was not the case. A persistent clash occurred between the Soviet delegation and Charles Singer throughout the congress, fuelled by Singer's attempts to generate publicity for the event and a powerful press reaction to the presence of the Soviets. The Congress became a significant focus for politics in Britain and Singer reacted by trying to silence the Soviets. The Special Session, far from being a platform for Marxist history of science, turned into a failed public relations exercise, and ultimately became the stage for the public humiliation of the Soviet delegates.

Role-Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire

This article explores the shared game mechanics seen throughout BioWare games, especially their Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as systems that invoke multiculturalist values and teach liberal tolerance. In both BioWare series, the player is set on a course to manage ethnic bodies into a racially determined division of labor (as military force), assuming the neutral position of a “multiculturalist umpire.” I investigate Mass Effect’s loyalty mechanic and its genre mixture of the role-playing game with the military shooter to consider how BioWare’s signature emphasis on team cooperation and supporting characters can express meanings that value American multiculturalism as exceptional, thus permitting forms of patriarchal and imperial violence to continue unabated. Finally, I consider how the player’s choice to play as female rather than male can shift the player’s experience from an imperialist attitude toward one of multiracial coalition that focuses on structures of patriarchal power and reproductive control.

Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada

Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada:Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada Michael Connors Jackman (bio) and Nishant Upadhyay (bio) Queer organizing against Israel’s deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as “pinkwashing” within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) imperialism. Such campaigns have directed attention to the realities of occupation in Palestine/Israel while simultaneously obscuring the historical and present-day colonial processes that enable transnational political intervention on Turtle Island—or what is commonly known as Canada and the United States.1 In this essay, we ask how critics of Israeli pink-washing—known as pinkwatchers—varyingly challenge, engage, negotiate, perform, or reproduce settler colonialism on Indigenous lands. We examine debates over the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apart-heid (QuAIA) in Pride Toronto (Pride) in 2010 and the subsequent formation of the Pride Coalition for Free Speech (PCFS). By focusing on these debates, we seek to critically explore how certain queer praxes have worked to normalize and invisibilize settler colonialism in the Canadian context and to reproduce Canada as a progressive queer-friendly liberal state. While our discussion focuses on QuAIA, PCFS, and Pride 2010, the objective of our essay is not to single out groups and organizations but to contribute to conversations about the broader political stakes of anti-racism, anticolonialism, and decolonization in radical queer organizing. These examples serve as the entry point for us to consider in what ways the articulation of “radical queer perspectives” might be complicit with the white settler state project, wherein the casting of Canada as a gay-friendly nation invisibilizes past and ongoing processes of colonialism. Our essay [End Page 195] suggests that criticism of the use of queer rights and liberal tolerance to justify governmental, industrial, and military actions often works to limit discussions of settler colonialism to places, nations, and peoples who are already invisible within that frame. Describing how queer groups naturalize notions of belonging and Canadian identity, as well as how queer critiques of pinkwashing fail to address settler colonialism in Canada, we seek to underscore the way Indigenous struggles for sovereignty are invisibilized in activists’ attempts to address issues of free speech, homonationalism, and occupation in Palestine/Israel. Where the pinkwashing of Israel has been criticized by queer activists who effectively surveil and organize against, or pinkwatch, such activities, the complicity of their activist efforts with settler colonialism ultimately whitewashes colonization in Canada. We argue, therefore, that the pinkwatching of Israel enables the pinkwashing, or rather whitewashing, of Canada. Logics of Pinkwashing/Pinkwatching Toronto has played a pivotal role in transnational organizing around Palestinian solidarity and challenging the apartheid state of Israel—with several labor, student, faculty, artist, and community organizations central to this organizing. Collectively they have pushed the limits of analyses of solidarity, colonialism, imperialism, race, gender and, increasingly, questions of queerness and sexuality (see, for example, Ravecca and Upadhyay 2013). Through the work of QuAIA, Toronto has come to serve as a key site on the global map in the struggle against Israel’s attempts to pinkwash its occupation of Palestine. Not only does QuAIA challenge Israeli apartheid, but it also informs queer praxis in Toronto. It engages a queer perspective that is intersectional and contextualized by an analysis of colonialism, racism, Islamophobia, and heteropatriarchy. QuAIA was formed to work in solidarity with queers in Palestine and Palestine solidarity movements around the world, alongside groups such as Queers in Solidarity with Palestine and Israeli Queers for Palestine. The group challenges homophobia in Israel, Palestine, and across all borders. QuAIA acknowledges on its website that “the struggle for sexual rights cannot come at the price of other rights” (queersagainstapartheid.org). QuAIA activists are very critical of Israeli apartheid and Israeli attempts to pinkwash and create an image of Israel as a “haven” of gay tolerance in the Middle East. They push queer politics beyond the liberal queer positive image of Israel, as a state [End Page 196] that recognizes same-sex marriages, permits legal adoption for queer citizens, and allows gays to serve in the military. As a voice for critical intervention...

The Filipino American in Spaces of Liberal Tolerance: Satire and Reciprocity in Peter Bacho's Cebu

In Peter Bacho’s novel Cebu (1991), Ben Lucero, a Filipino American Catholic priest living in Seattle, makes his first trip to the Philippines to bury his deceased mother. While returning to his roots in Cebu and Manila, Ben witnesses surges of religious and political violence that prompt his quick retreat from the poverty and corruption of the Philippines back to the “order” and “sanctuary” of Seattle (133). Literary scholars such as Elizabeth H. Pisares interpret Ben’s retreat as an escape from his social debt to the Philippines, arguing that Ben “evades what he perceives as a foreign Filipino discourse represented by utang na loob, or reciprocal indebtedness” (80). Yet Ben’s return can also be seen as a way of paying off a different social debt: his debt to the Pacific Northwest for providing a space of liberal tolerance. Throughout the novel, Ben shows gratitude to the Northwest for providing a space where violence, corruption, and poverty are displaced onto the history and geography of the Filipino homeland. Despite Ben’s imagined removal from violence, in the second half of the novel the Filipino migrants living in Seattle become entangled in cycles of revenge and murder that rupture the distancing of spatial and historic violence in the Philippines. To pay off his debt to both his host country and homeland, Ben performs as the Asian American model minority and encourages his Filipino congregation to do the same by abandoning their diasporic cultural practices, which he reads as gang violence in the case of Filipino men and sexual promiscuity in the case of Filipina women. Ben sees such practices, such as loyalty to one’s barkada (one’s peer group and community), as cultural attitudes that are intolerable to the Northwest’s multicultural social space because they foster religious ignorance and gang violence. As murders continue to pile up in Seattle’s International District and migrant Filipinos are thrown into cycles of revenge, Ben identifies the violence as a Filipino cultural aberration, discovering “something in [Filipino] culture, however diluted it was by life in America, that allowed wild swings in cruelty and

Secular fundamentalists? Characterising the new atheist approach to secularism, religion and politics

The ‘new atheism’ has become an established cultural reference point in Britain. The anti-religious texts of authors such as Richard Dawkins have fuelled much media discussion concerning the public role of religion in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The new atheism has also been politically controversial, with a government minister recently criticising ‘secular fundamentalism’ for threatening religious identity and seeking to remove religion from public life. Many commentators have argued that new atheism effectively mirrors the features of religious fundamentalism, evincing an intolerant and absolutist worldview that may damage social and political relations. This article seeks to examine the extent to which new atheism possesses features that echo those of the religious fundamentalist. It is contended that while the new atheists display strong anti-religious convictions, they generally do not adopt stances of absolute certainty. New atheists promote uncompromising arguments for depriving religion of institutional and political privileges, yet maintain liberal tolerance for the practice of religion itself. It is suggested that while new atheists ought not to be considered secular fundamentalists, they do proselytise for radical secularism and atheism in a way which could be considered ‘evangelical’ in certain respects.

Communitarian journalism and the common good: Lessons from theCatholic Worker

The US newspaper the Catholic Worker ( CW) is an instructive example for developing a key concept in communitarian journalism theory: the common good. The principal question to be examined in this article is: how can communitarian journalists make constructive use of the inherent tension between particular common good s and the common good? To answer this question, I will refer to the experience of the CW in negotiating two particular tensions: the tensions between spiritual/temporal and between Catholic/American. A secondary question to be explored is: how can communitarian journalism move beyond liberal tolerance in responding to difference in pluralistic societies? To answer this question, I will elaborate on the CW’s practices of hospitality, which have allowed staffers to remain faithful to the paper’s particular conception of the common good while actively engaging with, and learning from, their non-Catholic neighbors.

Towards a geography of tolerance: Post-politics and political forms of toleration

This paper argues for a closer inspection of how tolerance and politics interact. Within geography and beyond there is rising concern about post-political situations, whereby potential disagreements are foreclosed and situated beyond the remit of political debate. This is conceptualised as a process of de-politicisation that operates ‘much more effectively’ than alternative ways in which politics can be and has been disavowed (Žižek, 1999: 198). While Žižek associates liberal tolerance with the post-political condition, however, theories of tolerance are at odds over whether it represents an everyday enactment of the political. Although some authors have indeed associated tolerance with a depoliticising tendency (Brown, 2006), others insist that certain types of tolerance are capable of nurturing simultaneous recognition and disagreement, which directly contradicts the conditions of post-politics (Forst, 2003). We therefore ask, contra Žižek, whether certain forms of tolerance can be an antidote to the post-political practice of foreclosing politics, and offer a set of considerations pertinent to the geographical analysis of this issue.

Empire and the Dispositif of Queerness

Thinkers heavily indebted to Foucault—such as Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Jodi Melamed and Jasbir Puar—are at the fore of a contemporary interrogation of queerness and racialized empire. This paper critically surveys this terrain, differentiates several strands of it, and attempts a theoretical reframing such that we may be better equipped to gain new vantage on the central problematic. I argue that the current conviviality of queerness and empire is best understood not only through a univocal ‘homonationist’ lens, but also requires situating in the context of multiple languages of civilizational superiority and liberal tolerance. In particular, it requires the deployment of arguments about the ‘benchmark of civilization,’ in which whole societies are ranked along a unilinear trajectory of development according to standards set by the most powerful among them. One relatively recent addition to the criteria of civilizational adjudication is the capacity of societies to ‘tolerate’ new forms of societal difference. In this case, I argue, the most important of these are the strange pairing of sexual and religious dispositifs.

Three Versions of Liberal Tolerance: Dworkin, Rawls, Raz

Three Versions of Liberal Tolerance: Dworkin, Rawls, Raz

Three Versions of Liberal Tolerance: Dworkin, Rawls, Raz

Three Versions of Liberal Tolerance: Dworkin, Rawls, Raz

Principle or Pathology? Adjudicating the Right to Conscience in the Israeli Military

The Israeli military's Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants’ principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacifist conscientious objection based in embodied visceral revulsion to violence did not challenge the state and moral order, and such cases were granted exemption. Objections based in understanding pacifism as a physical incapacity depoliticizes it by making it incommensurable with public moral debate concerning military service. The pathologization of pacifism demonstrates a contradiction between liberalism's ideology and its practices, revealing that the limits of liberalism are not only exterior, in nonliberal alterity, but also on liberalism's own interior frontiers.

Finding quality in ‘being good enough’ conversations

This article considers how a contribution based on Rorty’s philosophy can help in the understanding of quality and its assurance in higher education. The suggestion is that if quality has an edifying purpose, then it should be seen as an ongoing process and might be aptly judged as being just ‘good enough’. This position is argued for it promotes democracy and thus justifies a position of belief in the liberal values and tolerance at the core of higher education’s resistance to the new ‘value for money’ imperative for surveillance of quality.

Tolerating Babel

D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel both treat the biblical figure of Babylon/Babel positively and negatively. These films are analyzed for their ambivalence toward Babylon, as it dramatizes and facilitates the tensions between unity and diversity, control and mobility, rights and interest, individual discipline and regularization of the population at work in biopolitical U.S. empire. These films wish to rebuild Babel: they propose cinema as a universal language able to bridge communicative divides and remedy the violence and social control of intolerant empire. In imagining a more tolerant world, they ostensibly value diversity. Yet they want to return to the normative sexual relations of the white heteronormative family. Thus, both films mirror an ambivalence, also found in Genesis 11, toward social/political unity and diversity, producing a liberal tolerance discourse wherein the regulation and regularization of populations via biopolitics can be detested and yet pursued.

An Exploration of Redneck Whiteness in Multicultural Canada

As Canada celebrates forty years of official multiculturalism (1971), a shifting urban/rural dyad (Neal) is central to its configuration. Its urban centers are positioned as diverse racialized spaces unlike their less diverse and more white rural counterparts. In this paper, I explore the relationships between rurality, whiteness, and multiculturalism through the rise of the redneck in North America and the Canadian Redneck Games in rural Ontario. While seemingly politically incorrect, I argue that these expressions of rural whiteness provide both critique and coherence to liberal whiteness and multicultural policies. Celebrations of rural whiteness uphold the frontier narratives (Furniss), the past which helps structure multiculturalism as a contemporary form of white liberal tolerance of and benevolence toward Indigenous peoples and racialized others. These mutually sustaining narratives constitute a contemporary politics which is unable to address past colonial crimes and contemporary racial violence.

When trans translates into tolerance - or was it monstrous? Transsexual and transgender identity in liberal humanist discourse

The article explores the way in which trans people represent a cultural ‘difference’ that has to be managed in liberal-democratic societies of today. The point of departure is liberal tolerance discourse, as analysed by Wendy Brown, in which the threatening ‘others’ are being regulated in order to prevent the social order from being destroyed from within. In accordance with liberal norms and values, tolerance promotes individual choice and autonomy: the individual’s freedom of identity. It also assumes, however, that identities, such as trans identity, issue from an essence or inner truth to be found in the person. This subjectivity-constituting contradiction lies at the core of liberal tolerance discourse. Trans people bring into question this contradiction, thereby challenging the foundations of normative subjectivity. The key question that emerges is whether liberal humanist tolerance defies horror and hostility or whether tolerance discourse creates its own gendered and sexualized monsters suitable for late-modern, flexible regimes of governmentality.

Lesbian teachers' identity, power and the public/private boundary

This article examines lesbian teachers' negotiation of the public/private boundary in the school, focusing on identity management in the context of the heterosexualised space of this public institution. The study is based on interviews conducted with six lesbian teachers working in London secondary schools. I examine the teachers' responses, and the ways in which they mediate the ‘polite’ silences in relation to lesbian and gay sexuality, as situated in a framework of liberal tolerance found in public and political domains. Sex and relationship education guidance, as well as recent policy initiatives concerned with homophobic bullying, play an important role in framing the discourses around sexuality in the school. However, the continuation of problems with heterosexism and homophobia in schools is evident. I argue that the lesbian teacher's negotiation of the public/private boundary and of power relations involves the heightened importance of a ‘good teacher’ identity, and an emphasis on professionalism. While these teachers do not speak of direct victimisation or abuse, much change needs to take place to transform the school into a place where lesbian and gay sexuality may be named without fear.

Between Enlightened Exclusion and Conscientious Inclusion: Tolerating the Muslims in Germany

The purpose of this article is to explore the nature of tolerance that is exhibited towards Muslims in Germany today. It is possible to make a two-fold distinction in liberal tolerance between exclusive and inclusive modes. While, a theory of toleration that recommends toleration on the basis of “autonomy” would qualify as an exclusive one, a theory that recommends extending toleration on the basis of “freedom of conscience” would be an inclusive one. We argue that it is the autonomy-based toleration that is dominant in contemporary Germany. We display the nature of exclusive tolerance in Germany by focusing on the discussion of public policies that are targeting Muslims and the experience of Muslim women in Germany. The public policies that we focus on are concerned with the citizenship/naturalization, and immigration laws. The experience of Muslim women is uncovered through a field research based on semi-structured in-depth interviews.

Crimes of Transgression

Anthony Julius and Julian Petley discuss obscenity and the limits of liberal tolerance