LGBT+ Programs

Liberalism has failed. The paradox in modern society between capitalism and democracy
has violated the very principles of liberty, equality, and social justice that liberalism
bases its ideology behind. Liberalism, in directly choosing capitalism and private
property has undermined its own values and ensured that the theoretical justice, in which
its foundation is built upon, will never be. This piece of work will take the monumental,
landmark, liberal work, A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls, as its foundation to examine
the contradictory and self-defeating ideological commitment to both capitalism and
democracy in liberalism. I will argue that this commitment to both ideals creates an
impossibility of justice, which is at the heart of, and is the driving force behind liberal
theory. In liberalism‟s place, I will argue that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon‟s anarchism, as
outlined in, Property is Theft, offers an actual ideological model to achieving the
principles which liberalism has set out to achieve, through an adequate and functioning
model of justice.

This work is a declaration of non-compliance with cultural studies; it is a motion of no confidence. Specifically addressing queer theory as a case study, this work will challenge the continued influence of postmodernism in cultural studies for the purpose of addressing power in the present and the rise of neoliberal capitalism via information technologies. The aim of this dissertation is to intervene in cultural studies and to engage in a set of critical inquiries into neoliberal governance with the hope that what emerges is a lens that can adequately assess information technologies and challenge the production of postfordist subjectivity. It is not through institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation with internet technologies. Neoliberal multiculturalism includes all bodies and experiences via their reduction to data and network flow. Difference no longer presents itself as a potential site for disruption but emerges as a site of appropriation for information technologies constantly involved in the repackaging of data possibilities. Thus, neoliberalism presents a unique challenge to theorists of identity and power that must be met with changing techniques that speak to and challenge the ways that differences are reduced to postfordist being.

Cultural studies need nihilism. The current canon of work (Butler, Foucault, Hooks, etc.) focuses too heavily on a political age and human condition that is rapidly being altered and replaced by the use of neoliberal technologies. A new understanding of ontology and politics is necessary to make sense of and challenge the changing technological orientation of human beings by what Deleuze has called a mutation of capital (Deleuze 2000: 90). It is not through institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation with internet technologies. Neoliberal technologies include and appropriates all bodies and experiences via their reduction to data and network flow; difference is no longer a tool of resistance. This work will assert that a move to a nihilist reading of ontology is what is missing from the work of cultural scholars and from current political movements interested in challenging the power of capital in the present. This work will attempt to build through nihilism a lens and an orientation via psychoanalytic theory and the work of Slavoj Žižek that offers resistance to neoliberal governance.