Space invaders: “Dissonant bodies” in positions of power: A conversation with Nirmal Puwar

Abstract

In July 2022, the Centre for the Study of Gender and Sexuality of the City University of London organized a seminar to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Following on from the rich discussion it generated, we organized an interview-conversation with the author, Nirmal Puwar, to contextualize the book in light of contemporary, seemingly more diverse – but also increasingly aggressive and exclusionary – forms of public discourse and social policies. We designed questions to engage with Nirmal in an open conversation about what does change, if at all, once dissonant bodies reach positions of power, starting from the contexts closest to us: England and Italy.

2004 saw the publication of Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place by feminist sociologist Nirmal Puwar, now Reader and British Academy Innovative Fellow (2023/2024) at Goldsmiths College London. ¹ The book – Nirmal Puwar’s doctoral thesis – questions the alleged neutrality of places of power, studying the presence of non-white and non-gender bodies within institutional places such as the British parliament, the art world and the university.

We, Chiara Martucci and Manuela Galetto, met Nirmal Puwar that same year, 2004. We were in our early thirties and members of the feminist collective Sconvegno. ² Based in Milan, we would regularly participate in meetings of national and transnational feminist networks. On one such occasion, at the University of Dublin, we met Nirmal at an assembly that also included Chandra Talpede Mohanty and many other activists and scholars from the Next Genderation network. ³ We met again in London, at the Social Forum in 2004, and we later worked, together with others, for a Special Issue of Feminist Review dedicated to Italian feminisms. ⁴

In March 2005, as Sconvegno, we co-organized the presentation of the book Space Invaders at the Casa della Cultura in Milan. For Italy, at that time, to talk about ‘racialized’ or ‘gendered’ bodies in institutions was rather uncommon. Twenty years ago, Italy could not have been further away from England in terms of the presence of people with migrant backgrounds in schools, institutions and, far less, in positions of power. The same applied to diversity within academia and in scholarly debates. For us, Nirmal – with her book and her own experience – represented a space revealer: She was a revealer of how institutional spaces work and of the power dynamics that run through them. Her work showed the close connection between bodies and spaces, which is socially constructed, repeated and continuously contested. Formally, women and ‘minorities’ do have access to positions from which they were previously excluded. In practice, however, social spaces are not neutral, nor open to be occupied by anybody. While, in theory, anyone can enter institutions, it is only certain bodies that are tacitly designated as the natural occupants of specific positions. Some bodies are therefore considered to have the right to belong, while others are marked as transgressors and – according to the criteria by which spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually) – are identified as out of place. As soon as ‘dissonant bodies’, as Nirmal calls them, come to occupy positions that were not designed for them, they are regarded as intruders, space invaders, because they do not correspond to the ‘somatic norm’ (white, male and heterosexual). Their mere presence challenges ancestral boundaries. Interrogating the paradox of the growing proximity of bodies hitherto considered ‘external and dissonant’ with ‘internal and appropriate bodies’ reveals the value system and hierarchies implicit in institutions, allowing us to see a less obvious and complex range of exclusionary mechanisms.

On a theoretical level, Space Invaders was a key reference point in the debate now growing in Italy too. It is cited, for example, by Caterina Romeo (2018) in Riscrivere la nazione. Letteratura postcoloniale italiana (Rewriting the Nation. Italian Postcolonial Literature) and by Rachele Borghi (2020) in Decolonialità e Privilegio. Pratiche femministe e critiche al sistema mondo (Decoloniality and Privilege. Feminist Practices and Critique of the World System). We find it also in the work edited by Alessandra Cianelli and Beatrice Ferrara (2021), Postcolonial Matters. Tra gesti politici e scritture poetiche (Postcolonial Matters. Between Political Gestures and Poetic Writings) and in the book we co-edited with Gaia Giuliani for ombre corte publisher in 2014, L’amore ai tempi dello tsunami. Affetti, sessualità e modelli di genere in mutamento (Love in the Time of Tsunami. Affections, Sexuality and Changing Gender Patterns).

In July 2022, the Centre for the Study of Gender and Sexuality of the City University of London organized a seminar to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Space Invaders publication. ⁵ Scholars and activists, including us, intervened to contextualize the book in the light of seemingly more diverse, contemporary – but also increasingly aggressive and exclusionary – forms of public discourse and social policies. There were questions about the extent to which the cultural context has changed and in what ways. It was a rich and in-depth exchange from different perspectives that highlights how vital the book’s contents still are in the debate of different disciplines: from political science to geography, from gender studies to social media studies. Following on from the event, we organized a conversation with Nirmal to further discuss the current developments in the national contexts closest to us: England and Italy. ⁶ We – Chiara and Manuela – designed questions to engage with Nirmal in an open conversation about what changes, once dissonant bodies reach positions of power.

Manuela Galetto:

On this 18th birthday of Space Invaders, we look around and must recognize that, compared to 2004, there is a growing public presence of people once considered as ‘invaders’, bodies traditionally excluded, who now occupy positions of real power. This is true for both England and Italy, albeit to different degrees, if we think of the current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and members of his diverse cabinet (first Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng, then Suella Braverman). In Italy for the first time, we have a female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. At the same time, we cannot help but feel a gap between an inclusion that seems to us just rhetorical when juxtaposed with an equally obvious reality, both in public and private life, of extremely aggressive, misogynistic, and racist attitudes, of intolerance towards minorities, both in England and in Italy. So, we would like to discuss this with you, Nirmal: To what extent can this public diversity be interpreted as a sign of achieved equality and inclusion?

Nirmal Puwar:

This is a key question, I think, because, as you say, the numbers and demographics have changed, and it is a surprise here too to have an Asian prime minister. There have been jokes amongt the Asian and black communities on social media, along the lines of ‘Unbelievable! We have an Asian prime minister in this British colonial government!’. However, we must also keep in mind the paths these people walked. Rishi Sunak’s parents were immigrants, but he had a very English education (Winchester College first, Oxford University later, a Masters from Stanford, and so on). He is also wealthy and married to an equally affluent Asian woman. An interesting aspect about Rishi Sunak is that he is seen primarily as an economist. He was accepted, but as a specialist. He does not have the gravitas that, for example, Boris Johnson showed. This is interesting because usually when – especially racialized – outsiders arrive to power, they do so as specialists in a field, rather than as universalists or generalists, and I think there is that ‘trouble’ going on. You can see it from the comments about his body. I do not support him, but I’m just analysing it as a case. When he entered Parliament, there were immediately comments about his height. There is a kind of recurring somatic language in the way he is being apostrophized, from both the left and the right. It is always interesting to see the way in which the left also attacks the right, when the right puts in a difference.

Now, the other thing to note, if we talk about race, gender and class, is that we also have two Asian women in Government. Priti Patel and Suella Braverman are both from families of Asian descent, and both proposed extreme anti-immigrant laws, determined to ‘send the refugees to Rwanda’. I think that the diversity they embody becomes an asset to right-wing politics: It makes it appear more human than it really is. The diversity of which they are an expression is captured and weaponised; that is, by being non-white themselves, the message is amplified, even though the policies are the same as those carried out by white Home Office ministers. It is as if, to exist in right-wing politics, one must claim and reinforce the language of the right itself. In the book Space Invaders, I use the word amplification referring to the amplification of bodies, whereas here we have an amplification of right-wing politics by ‘dissonant bodies’ to make a legitimate claim to be in that position. They are so worried about being expelled, about being seen as unpatriotic and disloyal to the nation, that they use these cards to claim the seat that they fear might otherwise be taken from them at any moment. The Tory party leadership race in the Summer of 2022 was incredibly diverse, but in their promotional videos, what was interesting was how candidates did refer to their migration story but in the rhetorical key of ‘amazing Britain’. They did not make references to the Empire, or if they did, it was certainly not in terms of an act of violence. They see it as a story of meritocracy in the nation. They are so patriotic that they want to get wrapped up in the Union Jack and everything it represents. So, it is really curious how these positions are expressed; but you cannot make an automatic reading of it, you have to be very culturally specific, looking at what is happening. I thought it was significant how Rishi Sunak experienced Diwali, the Hindu festival of Lights: He lit candles outside the Prime Minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street, and you could see that as a multicultural act. Sunak immediately presented himself as a multicultural politician, but I think there is an attempt underneath to appropriate the multicultural flag. There is in fact a double mechanism: a claim to a right to be part of the Union Jack and to be a bearer of a specific multicultural flag. So, thinking about the current reality – if the original question was whether this represents a turning point or not – I think yes, the reality is changing with the arrival and presence of these diverse bodies but that does not mean that the political context is becoming more progressive in terms of policy. It is a very uneven reality. That is why you can never assume that bodies with somatic features that are different from the norm, as well as bodies of different genders, bring with them a particular politics. We know that this has not been the case since the time of Margaret Thatcher.

But now, I have a question for you: Apparently Giorgia Meloni has said that she feels the burden of being the first woman prime minister in Italy, and in an article I read in The Guardian ⁷ , she claims to be inspired by feminist figures of the past in Italy, some of whom are left-wing, and she claims them as part of her legacy as a woman in power. How do you see it?

Chiara Martucci:

Certainly, Giorgia Meloni is, like Margaret Thatcher, a woman with a worldview fully inscribed within the patriarchal culture, but she is also a woman capable of leadership, has strong convictions, and shows aggressiveness in confronting political enemies. While I do not agree with her positions at all, I think her figure is very ambivalent. First, she is an activist, someone who comes from the streets and grass roots politics from a very young age. She is from a working-class background and grew up in a suburb of Rome, she is – as she calls herself – an underdog. She is more prepared and intelligent than most of her male fellow politicians, and on many occasions, she has demonstrated that she is consistent and strong-minded. Her grit and tenacity gave her the upper hand over male leaders, who clearly are going through a credibility crisis, especially since the post-pandemic period. Both during the elections campaign and, more generally, in her political career, the fact that she was a woman did count. In the famous speech in which she stated, ‘I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Christian, I am Italian’, she embodied and championed the traditional values of ‘God, homeland, family’, but at the same time, she was, until recently, the only female Secretary of an Italian political party. She knows very well the honours and burdens of being the first woman to hold a role traditionally reserved for men. I think she does not want to be called Prime Minister [presidentessa, in the feminine declination] because – as you said in talking about Rishi Sunak – she does not want to feel that she represents a partiality, a specificity, but she aspires to be a universal leadership figure. I suppose it is true that she feels the weight of the expectations of being the first woman Prime Minister in Italy and that she is inspired by female figures of the past, even if from different political positions than her own. It remains that she is not a feminist because she embodies an individualist model of leadership and has no political connections with other women, as Giorgia Serughetti says. ⁸ Barbara Leda Kenny brilliantly summarised it: ‘Meloni represents the success of one woman alone: in terms of possibility, she does not shift much in the lives of others’. ⁹ She is not a feminist.

NP:        

I wonder what her relationship with men is like. I remember when I interviewed one of the conservative women in Parliament, she said that these men know women as ‘nannies, grannies and fannies’. These roles influence what men respect in a woman. Some of them respected Margaret Thatcher because she was like a mother who scolded them, told them to behave and took care of the household budget, that is, the country. I wonder, in Meloni’s case, whether she too is using some kind of maternal authority?

MG:

In a way, yes. In this regard, I found an article by Lea Melandri, when Meloni was about to be elected, illuminating. ¹⁰ Lea states that: ‘For many men who often lived in the shadow of mothers who are often stronger and more combative than the fathers, she is a family figure who they do not feel is in competition with them, who does not threaten their power because she shows that she has absorbed it without any criticism or distancing’. In other words, she is not seen as a threat to male power. Giorgia Meloni is also liked by women, Melandri says again, albeit for different reasons, in a spirit ‘of revenge and coming out from the position of victim’. Meloni follows a well-known and internalised script of traditional gender roles and does not threaten her party’s conservative values, based on family and patriarchy. On the contrary, she embodies them and, being a woman, defends them even more effectively than what a man could do. I think Chiara is right that Meloni is a genuine politician who sincerely believes in her (right-wing) ideas, and this is a kind of politics that wants nothing to do with identity issues because such issues complicate, question and threaten the established order.

CM:

Could we say that minorities can access those places and roles from which they were previously excluded precisely only if they are within the framework of an extremely traditionalist party that does not challenge the status quo? In this way, as Nirmal said, they legitimise the most reactionary and exclusionary policies – such as British ministers of Asian descent who want to expel immigrants. They probably wouldn’t have access to power by embodying diversity if they weren’t already embedded within a pro-system scheme, let’s say. What do you think?

NP:

Yes, I agree with that. We have a political figure here in Coventry, Zarah Sultana, who is part of the left-wing of the Labour Party, and she is our local MP and the target of many attacks. She is a well-prepared, socialist young woman. She even uses the word ‘socialist’ – which is a bit of a dirty word in England’s mainstream discourse – and is the victim of constant personal attacks through social media and in public debates. Research was done a while back on how black and leftist women are the most attacked, as an absolute minority. That is, you cannot be a minority and leftist, therefore critical of the system, if you want to enter the institutional public political space.

CM:

In Space Invaders, you name very clearly some phenomena that are triggered towards ‘dissonant bodies’: disorientation, amplification, infantilization and over-scrutiny. These dynamics translate, as you said, into incredibly detailed attention to everything they do and say and an almost morbid interest in their bodies. Another risk you point out is that of tokenism: having women and minorities just to tick a box, a USA-originated term for ‘that minimal effort to appear inclusive’, as Nadeesha Uyangoda ¹¹ ironically defines it, often from a purely self-promotional perspective. Along the lines of ‘you’re here because this is how we show that these spaces are not only accessible to male, white, heterosexuals. We make a good impression, and no one can tell us anything’. We would like to ask you if you think these dynamics are still there, and in case, which ones in particular?

NP:

I do think these dynamics are still there, and they also apply to people on the right who are ‘outsiders’, non-conforming. In the book, I talk about certain processes, the first of which is disorientation: That is, many people are surprised that there is this ‘different’ person in that role. In the book, I quoted Winston Churchill’s story when he talks about how he felt the first time a woman entered Parliament, saying ‘I was as embarrassed as if someone had entered my bathroom while I was naked and I didn’t even have a towel to defend myself with’. It makes one wonder how, with 650 men in Parliament, a single woman would cause such a sense of threat. Today the situation is probably less extreme, I would say, but a senior, high-profile person I interviewed once told me, ‘people still look at you twice’, as in, ‘is this person really in this role?’. So, I think there is still an element of disorientation and traditional figures feeling somewhat displaced. Churchill was extreme, and the reaction he expressed was rather visceral, but I also think there is still a gut reaction from people. And then, of course, there is this dynamic whereby minority representatives are infantilized, they seem younger than they really are, or they seem to carry this ‘burden of doubt’, that they can’t make it, people aren’t sure if they are competent enough; a big question mark constantly hovers over them. I remember a congresswoman once saying to me, ‘We will have equality when women can afford to be as mediocre as men’ because when outsiders make a mistake, there is a tendency to blame them much more than if it had been made by a ‘normative’ figure. If you think of all Boris Johnson’s or Trump’s scandals, these are simply ignored and easily forgotten, their mistakes are not magnified. I think there is still an element of that. Those who represent a minority still suffer the burden of doubt and the burden of having to prove that they are particularly loyal, to the party values, to the country or otherwise they risk returning to a precarious or weak position again. They have not yet achieved the status of those whose portraits are commonly found in public spaces and historic places. Many institutions say they want to decolonize and have begun to look at those names who attended them, putting their portraits on the wall and commemorating them. One example is the University of Oxford, where Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born cultural studies theorist, studied on a fellowship named for Cecil Rhodes, a colonialist in South Africa, whose statue in Oxford sparked a major debate, which, in 2015, was eventually removed. The University of Oxford also added Stuart Hall’s portrait next to portraits of white celebrities (mostly men, but also women), a move that, in reality, only erases the problem rather than addressing it. When they invited me and asked me to talk about this, I said: ‘Good to have the portrait but why don’t you create an audio of Stuart Hall’s lectures on the Empire to put next to it? Because that would be really interesting’. That is, it is not simply a matter of adding a portrait of a minority representative alongside everyone else. The inclusion of Stuart Hall in this collection of great historical figures who attended Oxford University would make sense if, in addition to the image, we could also access the content that his presence brought, his thought and words. Stuart Hall would alter any discourse about the significance of these institutions, bringing out what, up to that point, has been covered up or, as he would have put it, ‘the amnesia of the violence of Empire’, what has been forgotten. This is an example of how differences and inclusion are managed and domesticated. So yes, I think processes like tokenism are still there, but they take on new forms. There is an expression currently in use, ‘optics of diversity’. In the advertisements of many companies, we see people of colour and various ethnic backgrounds, women and so on used to promote a corporate brand but, if you look inside those companies, those in positions of power are certainly not those on the posters. There is a change in the visual grammar of organizations and institutions that is really evident in England.

CM:

And that brings us directly to the next question. Manuela and I were reflecting on a potential backlash effect of inclusion. There is no doubt that gender, race and sexual orientation constitute – along with class – essential categories in understanding the dynamics of power, as well as structural and institutional discrimination. As soon as they are introduced into the academic discourse, however, a number of words and ideas that come from grass root struggles and the voices of marginalized subjectivities seem to have already been incorporated by the dominant discourse in ways that create unexpected short circuits. Similarly, when representatives of minority enter the academia or political and cultural life, they are subsumed into the logics of power and neutralized from the standpoint of the change they could bring. At the social and imaginary level, on the one hand, there is – as you say, Nirmal – ‘the optics of inclusion’ of certain categories, through advertising, movies and politically correct language. On the other, there remains a widespread form of resistance and even annoyance (even in circles that like to call themselves progressive) at the idea that habits, tones, language and practices have to change to make room for hitherto excluded experiences and sensibilities. The subtext of many conversations on this issue is ‘Come on now, isn’t it enough for them to have entered these places? Now we have to change because they came in? There is a limit to everything!’. To come to the question, we ask you, ‘Has the backlash effect to do with the fact that the inclusion of minorities comes only at the cost of their neutralization?’

NP:

Yes, it reminds me of when I interviewed a feminist in parliament asking her, ‘Is it challenging to exist here?’ and she replied, ‘Yes, the challenge is to change the place before the place changes you’. So, your habits and the modes of acceptance change because you are there. This brings me back to the example of Barak Obama. He came with an agenda of hope that was then neutralized because of the way the political system, and his own politics once he got into that place of power, justified a post-racial discourse: ‘Okay, we have a Black president, so anything can happen here. There is no discrimination, anything is possible’. And yes, I agree, people are bothered by pressures like ‘we have to have a woman’ or they ask, ‘why does this queer person have to be here?’. These are all pointing to the conditions of inclusion, and the important question to ask is, what are the conditions of inclusion for anyone? Just because I am a mother and a person ‘of colour’ and because I came to a Sociology department as a lecturer, you can’t say that other people can do it easily because I, along with others, have certain conditions of inclusion. Is it perhaps the greatest of achievements to be a woman lecturer ‘of colour’? I don’t think it is. For me, certainly, it is not. For others, it might be because then you will have achieved a certain somatic diversity in higher positions. While I understand that, as you said Chiara, that does not mean that these newly-included persons will bring – or will be able to bring, even if they want to – change. Sometimes people in these roles are frustrated, with big consequences on their mental health. It is like being inside Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’, ¹² it’s an existential dilemma, for some at least. You may know this – it hasn’t been published yet – but I’m working along with two researchers on a book about museums, gender and race, and I have interviewed many women of colour in relatively high positions within organizations. They tell us about this constant work in trying to change things and the work of emotionally managing others so they do not come across as too threatening to them, and this work is, of course, exhausting. This also reminds me of another example of ‘alternative leadership’. An acquaintance, Christine Eade, is leading a restaurant-project called The Pod in Coventry. Here, a philosophical approach to mental health is being experimented through the employment of people who have mental health problems in a soil-to-table restaurant. It is a local council project, which Christine led with an approach she calls ‘pirate leadership’, meaning she engages in what has been also called ‘quiet activism’. What is meant is that even within large bureaucratic organizations, such as a large municipality, or museums, with radical practices of inclusion and projects co-participated by the subjects they target, activism can be done, quietly, from within. This can be very effective.

MG:

It is interesting that you mention that, as ‘quiet activism’ is something I have only recently come across, and I immediately liked it as a concept. At first, it seemed very British to me, ‘Activism, yes thank you, but a quiet one, please!’. But it has to do, precisely, with the practices we act out in our daily lives, and from personal experience, I fully recognize its effectiveness. Within the organisation where I work, in addition to countering the male-centred, neoliberalist approach with, for example, union activism in recent years, I have come to realise the power and value of conversations built within the classroom and the discussion spaces it offers. Through the analysis and discussions about the asymmetries of power in employment, you open up spaces whereby students themselves come to ask more about it, they want to understand more about the exploitative nature of capitalism, for example, something that they feel they are not taught elsewhere, by more mainstream approaches to business studies. These exchanges, to me, feel like a form of (quiet) activism in itself.

NP:

Yes, it is interesting because then you don’t just focus on continually challenging rigid hierarchies of power and negotiating some extra space to be able to say something different, often without succeeding. Challenging tires you out. What’s more, power does not care about your challenges. So, what do you do? You create other spaces. You create a new space through courses and practices with the people and relations that we decide to build and engage with, and you grow it and continually give it new forms. You could say that you ‘mutate the space’. And that is what keeps you going. That is what I do. I can’t be bothered to argue with those who resist change all the time. I just create something else. Like you did, you can mutate the space you occupy and create new space.

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Once again, Nirmal Puwar proves to be a space revealer for us: On the one hand, she warns against falling into what Laurent Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’, ¹³ that is, an optimism entrusted to an unrealizable promise. In this case, this would equate to having enough new ‘somatically non-conforming’ faces to be able to speak of an achieved equality. A growing presence of people from different backgrounds in positions of power is certainly a new and important fact, but the analysis should not stop at the demographics. We need to be aware that it is not enough for ‘dissonant bodies’ to occupy these positions for public spaces to become more inclusive.

At the same time, it suggests to us an approach that breaks out of the frame of direct opposition between inside and outside and opens perspectives to change. It reminds us that the same spaces can be occupied and acted upon in different ways: One can follow new scripts, change the way one stands and relates in the space or even invent and create new spaces that did not exist at all until then. This is not in opposition to other, more classical forms of activism: There are many modes of taking action and struggle, and they can be acted upon synergistically, without self-exclusion.

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