Ben Hancox-Lachman’s Reviews > Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race > Status Update
Ben Hancox-Lachman
is 75% done
this view suggests that Begum, unable to manage the conflict between Western sexual freedoms and the more conservative values of her parents, has opted instead for the apparently nihilistic certainties of the caliphate. These interpretations belong to the same intellectual universe; they view political choices as psychologically determined, a view that derives from the individuations of sexual modernity.
— Jun 25, 2024 12:29AM
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Ben Hancox-Lachman
is 85% done
If we view Patel and Begum together, not as equivalents but as key players in the fracturing and recomposing of sexual modernity, we can see the work race continues to do in justifying violence, Begum is the source of such disturbed fascination precisely because she articulates an uncomfortable truth: that the violence of Islamic State cannot be severed from the violence of 'ordinary' nation-states:
— Jun 25, 2024 02:36AM
Ben Hancox-Lachman
is 50% done
the notion of an identity crisis — an apparently benign trope — is used to justify and extend Britain's extensive counterterrorism architecture. This architecture is embedded into everydaylife in Britain and exported around the globe.
— Jun 25, 2024 12:22AM
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*very limited forms of self-realisation
Why won’t people understand that self realisation is the goal but that the self must only ever relate to a productive member of society and if not you get made arbitrarily stateless it’s so easy to understand
Perhaps it is easier to believe that Patel is suffering from 'internalised racism' than that she is, herself, simply a racist. Perhaps it's easier to believe that Begum has been duped or tricked than that she believed in the political vision of Islamic State. In many ways, Begum encapsulates a thorny contradiction: though sexual modernity demands that we make use of our agency, it sanctions only very orms of self-realisation.