Cheryl Mattingly: Category Trouble: An Errant Phenomenology of Stigma and Care

Datum
16. Jan­u­ar 2024 

Event in the frame­works of vir­tu­al inReach sem­i­nars at the The Cen­tre for Research in the Arts, Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties (CRASSH)/University of Cambridge

„Cat­e­go­ry Trou­ble: An Errant Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of Stig­ma and Care”
Cheryl Mat­ting­ly (Aarhus Uni­ver­si­ty, Depart­ments of Anthro­pol­o­gy and Phi­los­o­phy & Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Depart­ment of Anthropology)

Kick­ing off event in the frame­works of vir­tu­al inReach sem­i­nars at the The Cen­tre for Research in the Arts, Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties (CRASSH)/University of Cambridge.

Could an errant ver­sion of crit­i­cal phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy help us see spaces of poten­tial­i­ty even in the grimmest cir­cum­stances? Could it help „defrost” our under­stand­ing of a con­cept like stig­ma? Stig­ma the­o­ry fore­grounds the work of social iden­ti­ty cat­e­gories in cre­at­ing sham­ing dra­mas. It is a very famil­iar – a too famil­iar – con­cept with­in crit­i­cal the­o­ry. How to think it anew? To dis­turb its cer­tain­ties? “Defrost­ing” is a metaphor bor­rowed from Han­nah Arendt. She pon­dered the prob­lem that dom­i­nant polit­i­cal and moral con­cepts freeze when they become canon­i­cal. She asked: what kind of think­ing is required to address this? With­in the Black rad­i­cal tra­di­tion, Glis­sant, Moten, Sharpe and oth­ers also raise Arendt’s prob­lem, but from a more poet­ic direc­tion. I sug­gest an errant crit­i­cal phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy that builds upon this work but fore­grounds ethnography’s „per­plex­ing par­tic­u­lars.” More con­crete­ly, I ask: How do African Amer­i­can moth­ers (and grand­moth­ers) nour­ish per­son­al and famil­ial moments of poten­tial­i­ty that dis­turb nor­ma­tive expec­ta­tions? How do they try to com­bat stig­ma by cul­ti­vat­ing these moments, offer­ing else­where worlds that live along­side, even with­in, ordi­nary life? My focus is on small domes­tic land­scapes that inter­rupt the dom­i­nant sociopo­lit­i­cal order and its stig­ma­tiz­ing gaze. 

inReach – /ɪn riːtʃ/ Sem­i­nar Series. A sem­i­nar series con­vened by Kel­ly Fagan Robin­son (Depart­ment of Social Anthropology)
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