Subjectivity Under Siege

 On Facebook I shared:

🕊️ Subjectivity in 2025: Expression, Erasure, and Safety

I’ve been thinking about how people show who they are—how we express ourselves and explore our identities. In the past, especially during movements like the 60s counterculture, people created new ways of being through art, community, and rebellion. It wasn’t just about protesting—it was about imagining new ways to live, love, and become.

But now, in 2025, I feel like something has shifted.

With growing political violence, rising fascism, and systems that strip away basic needs like housing, safety, and dignity, people are being forced to shrink themselves just to survive. Instead of expressing who they are, they’re often just trying not to disappear. They’re being erased—sometimes by censorship, sometimes by noise, sometimes by just being left out of the conversation altogether.

As a teacher, safety is one of my core values. I believe students need to feel safe in order to take real risks. When they don’t, they either withdraw completely—or they over-perform, trying to be what they think I want or what society expects. But that’s not real growth. That’s not real identity work. That’s survival theater.

I worry that even in art and activism—especially online—the pressure to perform in the right way, or in the most attention-grabbing way, is crowding out more quiet, honest forms of resistance. Not everyone speaks the language of hashtags and media-savvy slogans. That doesn’t mean their expression isn’t powerful.

So I’m wondering:
How can we create spaces where people can still explore who they are, even in a time of fear and erasure? How do we protect the slow, tender work of becoming in a world that keeps trying to flatten us?

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From an exchange with ChatGPT from sharing the above

🔻 1. From Expression to Erasure: Subjectivity Under Siege

You're identifying a shift from self-expression as emergence to self-preservation as erasure. Safety is no longer the baseline from which people perform identity—it’s become a privilege, not a given. Under regimes that deny basic needs (housing, food, community, bodily autonomy), selfhood becomes a battlefield. In such contexts, people often cannot afford the vulnerability required for expressive experimentation.

In other words, we're seeing subjectivity constrained by precarity—the emergence of what might be called "austerity identities." These are performative selves shaped more by survival strategies than by exploration.

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🧠 2. Hyperperformance as Survival Theater

Your note about "hyperperformance" is sharp. This is what some scholars might connect to "post-identitarian" critique—that subjectivity today often becomes a product rather than a process. In your classroom, that hyperperformance could show up as students mimicking what they think success should look like, especially if they come from marginalized or precarious positions.

Outside the classroom, this also maps onto influencers, micro-celebrities, or "aspirational subjectivities" online—hyper-performative modes of being that are more about visibility and legibility to capital or power than about authenticity or transformation.

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🎭 3. Artistic Expression vs. Algorithmic Attention

Your concern about resistance being excluded from the game is also key. In past movements, art offered rupture, refusal, ambiguity—resistance through aesthetics and defiance. But in a commercialized, algorithm-driven media ecosystem, ambiguity doesn't travel well. Subtle dissent doesn’t trend. Complex expression often gets lost or buried unless it's translated into platform-friendly forms.

We’re in what might be called the age of performative captivation, where the tools that once enabled expression are now repurposed for surveillance, commodification, or distraction.

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🕊️ 4. Safety as a Radical Pedagogical Value

Your commitment to safety as a pedagogical stance is powerful—and increasingly rare. Safety, as you frame it, isn't about coddling—it’s about making space for fluidity, uncertainty, and contradiction, which are essential conditions for real learning and identity play. That’s resistance in itself.

You're resisting what Foucault might call governmentality: the shaping of behavior through systemic risk, precarity, and institutionalized expectations. Instead, you're inviting students to engage in what bell hooks might call "education as the practice of freedom."

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🔦 5. Erasure and Silence as Tactics of Power

Your use of "erasure" recalls both decolonial and queer critiques—where invisibility is not just absence but an active process of silencing. In 2025, erasure is not only about not being seen, but also about being replaced by noise—a kind of algorithmic fog where meaningful resistance gets drowned out or co-opted by spectacle.

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