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At the heart of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet—a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm.[1] To the jewellery industry, it remains to be seen as to whether this enormous virtual cyberspace is a blessing, or, in fact, as curse. Fig 1. Tiffany & Co. Iris Corsage Ornament. Wikimedia Commons: Walters Art Museum. Since the expansion of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-based environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (VR HoloLens), augmented reality applications (Pokémon Go), and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Games (Upland). Such virtual environments have bought us various degrees of digital transformation and the term ‘metaverse’ has been coined to further reflect the digital transformation occurring in every aspect of our physical lives. For some, there is a sense of vigilance in engaging with the metaverse and are wary of the disruption it could cause for the community.[2] In the virtual world there are many examples of altruism and Samaritanism, but these come with the constant presence of players bent on distraction, disruption (or even destruction) that the digital community has to deal with. Boellstorff describes this phenomenon as the dark side of the disinhibition that many people find in virtual worlds.[3] Another aspect in this fluid nature of going between real and a virtual life, is that some people reside in more than one virtual world, sometimes as similar personalities, sometimes different. Sometimes they give up on one world and migrate to another.[4] Developments in electronic communications are drastically changing what it means to be human, interacting with other humans, and for our idea of creation.[5] Others have considered this world to have brought unprecedented opportunities for artists to blend every facet of our physical surroundings with digital creativity.[6] The value of recent technological developments for artists is more than being able to become more efficient and more productive. It is also the ability to ‘highlight and elevate humanness in new ways through art, even by appearing to replace the real with the virtual’.[7] New tools don’t simply replace humans, they allow human creators to shift into new realms of creation: creating dynamic systems and worlds instead of static products.[8] This piece will challenge such perspectives, showing that the digital and physical can simultaneously work together to maintain creative freedom in both spheres. This article will consider three different types of interactions that emerge from these digital immersive platforms in relation to the jewellery industry and explore the remarkable types of novel creations in the expanded horizons of metaverse cyberspace. Firstly, I consider the ways we can interact and experiment within this digital world. The discussion will then turn to issues of digital privacy and safety for metaverse artists and companies, bringing to light the questions around ownership of digital artworks. Then, the piece will reflect upon the origin of the metaverse itself and the effects this has on the creative freedom of artists, drawing together the material and immaterial worlds we live in. At the outset, we consider our world to be tactile, touchable, and have a physical presence. Yet is this actually the case today, and will this be so in the near future? After all, as of January 2021, there were more than 4.5 billion active internet users worldwide, and 92.6% of them accessed this digital world via mobile devices.[9] As such, there is an ever-growing overlap between our digital and physical lives, as we can socialise, create, and entertain ourselves through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), or simply through an alternate realm on-screen. Whilst terms such as ‘internet’, ‘online’, and, perhaps, ‘virtual reality’ are widely disseminated through society, what about the word ‘metaverse’? The term has become a buzzword within the last year, and, to put it simply, it is a shared three-dimensional state in virtual reality where people can interact. To enter this digital world, you have to put on a pair of augmented or virtual reality headsets, enabling you to interact and hang out with each other via avatars, just as you would in the real world.[10] What is so innovative in this computer-generated world, is that we are able to express and re-create ourselves with unparalleled creative freedom, not governed by the rules of reality. This is especially revolutionary in the jewellery space, which has already begun to intersect the physical world’s real-time, spatially oriented content with this emerging and immersive digital environment. In this context, let us first consider the ways artists can interact in this digital world. The metaverse offers the opportunity for the creation and virtual styling of digital jewellery across a variety of devices and platforms. This could be in gaming, for example, when the heritage Japanese pearl jeweller, Tasaki, collaborated with Animal Crossing to produce a collection for game avatars; to e-commerce, like Dress X’s digital accessories designed by the 3D designer Alejandro Delgado. Indeed, the metaverse has become a new space for design, as creators, artists, and consumers are able to exchange and make use of different models and creations, without any restrictions, across platforms. In this immersive world, it seems that 2021 was the year for the breakthrough of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).[11] This NFT market has surged exponentially, as a new study by NonFungible and L’Atelier BNP Paribas recorded sales reaching $17.7 billion in 2021, up from $82.5 million in 2020—a jump of more than 200 times.[12] Being able to sell NFTs within the metaverse acts as a massive incentive for digital jewellery to be produced. Some of the biggest releases of NFTs have stemmed from digital jewellery collaborations between celebrities, including Lil Pump’s ‘Esskeetit Diamond VVS’ collection. Available to purchase through the platform ‘Sweet’ in March 2021, Pump minted a total of five NFTs, each retailed for $10,000, possible to buy securely on a first-come-first-served basis.[13] The jewellery-themed sale, also, featured more affordable NFT cards at $10 each. The digital drop intended to emulate the American rapper’s physical jewellery, allowing fans and collectors to own a piece of his personal, multi-million-dollar jewellery collection in the digital world. According to Tom Mizzone, the CEO of NFT trading platform ‘Sweet’, ‘the future of rare, collectible merchandise is in the digital arena’, as evidenced by the growing interest in NFTs.[14] Some experts even consider NFTs could become the jeweller’s best friend in the near future, as it allows them to earn money via selling NFTs for digital jewellery. Asprey’s executive chairman, John Rigas, believes NFTs and jewellery are, ‘a perfect match’ as they ‘capture everything about the product, forever, when the information is part of the blockchain’, in turn bolstering the authenticity of these luxury goods.[15] As such, there are increasing deliberations across the sector regarding the technological benefits of the metaverse as designers can create captivating pieces of jewellery that draw inspiration from both the physical and digital realm. Thus, the digital world has opened the door to new types of interactions and considerations of what jewellery can be. Market experimentation within the metaverse offers solutions to some of the biggest spectres haunting the world of jewellery. The digital space offers jewellery companies a solution to two issues: the safety of transactions and devaluation of real jewellery. The security of the digital transaction in the current financial market is enabled by blockchain technology that backs digital assets, in turn, providing a tamper-proof, digital ledger of all the information on any product. This is becoming an appealing method for securing transactions as we live in an age where hacking, spyware, and digital fraud are an ever-present threat. The second aspect that metaverse assists with is devaluation of jewellery and diamonds occurring due to fluctuation on the market. Shockingly, as soon as they leave the jeweller’s shop, diamonds tend to lose value, depreciating by as much as 30-35% if they are re-sold.[16] The blockchain-based diamond marketplace, Icecap, offers a solution to this issue, developing a new way of online trading as it allows the trading of NFT tokens ‘without friction’ while the diamonds are vaulted and insured.[17] According to Icecap’s CEO, Jacques Voorhees, unlike liquid assets of gold and silver, purchasing diamonds through the online platform protects these valuable assets from the long-term problem of devaluation faced in the diamond industry.[18] Astonishingly, trading diamonds virtually, through platforms such as Icecap, allows their value to be retained, with investments retaining much more value. Prices of rare pieces, also, are more likely to preserve their investment price, such as the one-hundred-carat diamond necklace ‘Desert Wind’ which featured as part of Icecap’s inaugural line of collector-quality gems in the world’s first NFT diamond and jewellery collection, in May 2021.[19] Even Christie’s, the noted auction house, is paying close attention to the capabilities of digital assets in the metaverse. Their resident specialist Noah Davis has said, ‘blockchain is on the cusp of being integrated into every single creative industry’, alluding to the strong commercial interest attached to the evolving sphere of digital jewellery.[20] It must be recognised, however, that there are currently no laws that govern existing trademark registrations of physical goods in the metaverse. What does this all mean for traditional Intellectual Property (IP), such as trademarks and copyrights? There are some new instances, including the lawsuit that Hermès filed against the digital artist Mason Rothschild for creating, selling, and using ‘MetaBirkin’ in January 2022. The ‘MetaBirkin’ NFTs featured the Hermès Birkin handbag design, which was allegedly used without permission and in violation of its trademark rights. The luxury fashion retailer described Rothschild as ‘a digital spectator who is seeking to get rich quick’ by appropriating the brand ‘MetaBirkins’ for the exchange of digital assets NFTs.[21] Having said this, such cases have not yet been heard by courts. It may be that the disputed NFTs experience drastic fluctuations in value due to negative publicity and uncertainty over the courts’ decisions, but it is highly improbable for these cases to trigger a collapse of the general NFT market.[22] A simple reason for this is that more big-name brands are taking their first steps into the digital realm, and for these companies, the risk of their NFTs becoming the subjects of legal actions is extremely low as they own all the IP rights related to the underlying works. No doubt, IP practitioners, legal analysts and NFT traders alike will be avidly anticipating the decisions from the U.S. courts as these judgments will help determine how these online creations will interact with long-standing intellectual property rights, such as copyrights and trademarks. Thus, if a company is thinking of expanding into the metaverse, it would be worth their while to consider filing for relevant trademarks in order to have legal protection.[23] Still, there are great possibilities for the creative industries in the metaverse. Rather than a space for division, the metaverse will make jewellery appreciation and creation more accessible. Craftsmen, designers, and clients will be able to interact in a globally immersive world without the need to journey from gemmological mines, to workshops, and commercial stores. The metaverse will, also, make for better opportunities for self-expression: we will be able to communicate our individuality by designing and later re-designing jewellery to suit our current interests, interweaving inspiration from literature, art, and even our political beliefs. Indeed, for a considerable number of artists, the metaverse creates unending possibilities in the evolution of art and design. That said, preserving this digital blossoming of creativity is not always as straightforward as it first seems, as it has also become a stage for the expansion of corporate domination. One such artist providing insight and campaigning for the protection of public ownership in the digital sphere is Sebastian ErraZuriz. Blurring the boundaries between contemporary culture, art and technology , ErraZuriz has previously reworked Jeff Koons’ augmented reality (AR) sculpture in a political stance against the ‘ i mminent augmented reality (AR) corporate invasion’, which could ultimately fuel a version of the metaverse that is limited by corporate powers of intervention and business models. This piece was titled ‘Vandalized Balloon Dog’, intending to act as a direct criticism of Koons Partnership w ith Snapchat ‘which saw digital 3D versions of the artist's best-known sculptures appear in international tourists hot-spots via augmented reality’.[24] His latest project, an NFT start-up, Digital Diamonds Co., similarly intends to foster open innovation, focusing on promoting a new kind of diamond company. Each Digital Diamond is valued at the price of a real diamond using the Ethereum currency and has accommodated for changing pricing for bidding purposes. What is most interesting about Digital Diamonds Co. is the parallel drawn between real diamonds and the NFT creation. After all, diamonds are neither scarce, nor intrinsically precious, with their value a product of societal perception. In foresight, should artificial, lab-grown diamonds be considered to be of greater or equal significance and originality, in comparison to digital, artistic creations online? The nature of the metaverse also means that digital jewellery can sidestep issues of gemmological sourcing and occurrences of blood diamond mining; a desirable feature as consumers’ interest in ethically sourced diamonds is growing. In light of this, the evolving digital space offers a new-found freedom to artists from the complex gem authentication systems and control of the jewellery industry. The adoption of these immersive technologies can offer great creative freedom, without the limitations which govern our physical reality. Designers can use an unlimited array of gemstones, no longer be confined to small scale production, and can challenge the concepts of jewellery itself. Some of the largest fashion brands have begun to define their own label within this kaleidoscopic metaverse, as they, too, seek to explore it. Even the fashion house Gucci has recognised the value of the metaverse, presenting a digital display of their haute jewellery collection, ‘Hortus Deliciarum’, in 2021. The 130-piece collection is divided into four chapters, taking inspiration from the hues of an ever-changing, natural sky. Waterfalls, shooting stars, and celestial phenomena launched the first chapter’s designs, while the second section took inspiration from rose gardens. The colours of the sunset informed part three, with precious gemstones, such as opal, topaz, and garnets translating the rich twilight hues of the sky to one of nightfall. These pieces have a discordant symmetry as the jewels were placed mismatched to encapsulate the ephemerality of the sky as it passes from day to night. The fourth incorporated prides of lions, roaring their way around necklaces and earrings encrusted with gemstones. I believe that launching the jewellery collection in this way would simply not have been possible if it were in physical form: it feels as though Gucci chose to present the collection through a digital platform by also believing in the aptness of the metaverse. In a conventional display, the collection would not have had the same ambiance of enchantment, which captivated me and countless others.[25] And now, when the fine jewellery is worn for special events and red carpets, we can be reminded of its release in a digital format. As such, even the biggest names in commercial luxury are embracing the universe of possibilities that virtual jewellery creates. Keeping this in mind, the large-scale fashion brands designing luxury jewellery have not been the only ones to benefit from our ever-increasing connection with the metaverse. Independent artists are also able to blossom and collaborate with the creative aficionados driving the campaigns of high fashion. This is facilitated by the deregulated finance ecosystem (DeFi), which allows digital creators to sell and authenticate their NFTs without a field of experts deciding what is valuable, precious, or appealing. This helps designers, such as the New York based artist, Carol Civre, as DeFi applications give users more control over their money through personal wallets and trading services that cater to individuals. Civre’s digital creations can maintain space within the world of the big fashion brands, bridging the worlds of fashion, 3D art, and CGI to create an idealised ‘exaggeration of reality’.[26] The artist aims to transform, elevate, and explore the possibilities of the human body that may not be possible to explore in our physical lives.[27] Carol’s innovative ways of developing digital art were key to her success and have appealed to an extensive selection of brands, with her clientele including Chanel, Prada, and Vivienne Westwood. Her work has even been described as promoting an ‘E-Renaissance’ in Vogue Italia .[28] This digital space has facilitated collaborations between individual and large-scale enterprises to create new forms of jewellery that transgress the digital and physical world to form a united multi-experience for the consumer. Experiences can thus start in the physical world, but then extend into an infinite realm of the digital metaverse. It is surreal to think that we are already able to create and innovate in such an unhindered manner and in an alternative reality. It triggers a flurry of questions about what comes next in digital design. In the fashion industry, will there be a large-scale transformation with the new growth of opportunity for digital agencies, stylists, or collections, operating through the metaverse? While some companies will likely continue to operate only in the physical world, others that wish to can continue to exercise their duty in the creation of the new through digital design. With NFTs, blockchain gems, and the metaverse–jewellery is evolving beyond the physical bounds of reality, transitioning into a realm of pixels and colour. For these reasons, despite the continued process of jewellery designs serving both functions of being appreciated for its artistic qualities, as well as being an indicator of wealth, the industry is turning to digitisation to suit the future market and creative design. This is what sets the metaverse apart– the promise of infinite, artistic outcomes–and, in turn, the chance to transform the concept of jewellery in itself. On this premise, the fundamental concept of the metaverse is not to act as a way to supersede and out-do contemporary painterly, sculptural, or architectural practices so fundamental to our contemporary artistic practices today. Rather, it seeks to enable the blossoming of creative practices through a digital platform, in turn, preserving and connecting these two inspirational worlds. A thought to end this essay: this creative unity could, in fact, activate a radical shift as to how we can evaluate the notion of artistic freedom. Indeed, the interactions of the physical and digital world, in the jewellery, fashion, and broader cultural sphere could result in the transformative visualisations of our world around us. Danielle Jump Danielle Jump is an undergraduate student of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in the decorative arts, jewellery, and the ways in which these art forms are reflective of contemporary culture. She hopes to pursue a career within the art industry, specialising in contemporary jewellery. [1] Lik-Hang Lee et al, 'All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda' (2021) 14(8) Journal of Latex Class Files < https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.05352 > accessed 6 May 2022. [2] Daniel Schackman, ‘Review Article: Exploring the new frontiers of collaborative community’ (2009) 11(5) New Media & Society. [3] ibid. [4] ibid. [5] Gianluca Mura (ed), Metaplasticity in Virtual Worlds: Aesthetics and Semantic Concepts (IGI Global 2011). [6] Jeffrey M. Morris, ‘Humanness Elevated Through its Disappearance’ in Mura (n 5) 102. [7] ibid. [8] Microsoft Mesh (Preview) Overview’ (Docs.microsoft.com, 2022) < https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh/overview > accessed 6 May 2022. [9] Joseph Johnson, ‘Global Digital Population 2019’ (Statista, 2021) < https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/ > accessed 4 May 2022. [10] John Herrman and Kellan Browning, ‘Are We In A Metaverse Yet?’ The New York Times (New York, 10 July 2021) < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/10/style/metaverse-virtual-worlds.html > accessed 4 May 2022. [11] A term still unfamiliar to many, the NFT is an interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of a digital database, that can be sold and traded. Types of NFT data units may be associated with digital files, including photos, videos, and audio. Each token is uniquely identifiable, which differs from other blockchain currencies, such as Bitcoin. These NFTs can then be ‘minted’, referring to the process of turning a digital file into a digital asset on the Ethereum cryptocurrency blockchain, and it is impossible to edit, modify, or delete it. It is similar to the way metal coins are minted and put into circulation, non-fungible tokens are also ‘minted’ after they are created to retain their value on the digital marketplace. [12] NonFungible, ‘Yearly NFT Market Report 2021’ (NonFungible, 2022) < https://nonfungible.com/reports/2021/en/yearly-nft-market-report-free > accessed 4 May 2022. [13] Minting is the process of turning a digital file into a crypto collectible or digital asset on the Ethereum Blockchain. [14] Sweet, ‘Sweet Launches Broad-Scale NFT Solution For Leading Entertainment And Consumer Brands In Partnership With Bitcoin.Com’ (2021) < https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/sweet-launches-broad-scale-nft-solution-for-leading-entertainment-and-consumer-brands-in-partnership-with-bitcoin-com-1030044246 > accessed 4 May 2022. [15] Anna Tong, ‘Can NFTs Work For Luxury Jewellery?’ Vogue Business (21 June 2021) < https://www.voguebusiness.com/technology/can-nfts-work-for-luxury-jewellery-asprey-cartier > accessed 4 May 2022. [16] Preeti Kulkarni, ‘What You Should Keep in Mind When Investing in Diamonds’ The Economic Times (Mumbai, 12 October 2015) < https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/commodities/what-you-should-keep-in-mind-when-investing-in-diamonds/articleshow/49297685.cms > accessed 8 May 2022. [17] ‘Non-Fungible Token Hard Asset Diamond Investment | NFT Marketplace | Icecap’ (Icecap, 2022) < https://icecap.diamonds/ > accessed 6 May 2022. [18] ibid. [19] Jacques Voorhees, ‘The World’s First NFT Diamond & Jewellery Collection’ (Icecap, 2021) < https://storage.googleapis.com/icecap/CollectibleCerts/GD%20Icecap%20Catalogue%20April%202021.pdf > accessed 4 May 2022. [20] Tong (n 15). [21] Victor Danciu, ‘Not For Trademarks? The Truth About NFTs And IP’ (Dennemeyer, 2022) < https://www.dennemeyer.com/ip-blog/news/not-for-trademarks-the-truth-about-nfts-and-ip/ > accessed 4 May 2022. [22] ibid. [23] Philip Nulud, ‘Protecting Your Intellectual Property In The Metaverse And On NFTs’ (Lexology, 2022) < https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3458d650-8351-421f-a0ee-f1d5fbcb6094 > accessed 4 May 2022. [24] Anna Codrea-Rado, ‘Virtual Vandalism: Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog’ Is Graffiti-Bombed’ The New York Times (New York, 10 October 2017) < https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/arts/design/augmented-reality-jeff-koons.html > accessed 4 May 2022. [25] Sarah Royce-Greensill, ‘Gucci’s New High Jewellery Collection Is Worthy Of A Fantastical Fairy Princess - Or Prince’ The Telegraph (London, 21 June 2021) < https://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/jewellery/guccis-new-high-jewellery-collection-worthy-fantastical-fairy/ > accessed 4 May 2022. [26] Claudia Luque, ‘Review Of Carol Civre: An Extension Of Reality’ Metal Magazine (2020) < https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/carol-civre > accessed 4 May 2022. [27] ibid. [28] Rujana Cantoni, ‘RENAISSANC-E’ Vogue Italia (Milian, 17 July 2021) < https://www.vogue.it/fotografia/article/renaissanc-e-by-rujana-cantoni-7-3d-artists > accessed 4 May 2022.

Mariya Ionova wears many hats. She is a Member of the Parliament of Ukraine, holds a bachelor’s degree in Finance and Credit and a master’s in Global Business and International Economy, is a wife and mother of two children – and above all, is a fierce Ukrainian patriot. Over her eight-year tenure in Parliament, she has collaborated with others in government to secure Ukraine’s integration with Europe and to assist Ukrainians impacted by the ongoing Russian war. Since 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and launched a hybrid campaign in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Eastern Ukraine, she has regularly visited the contact line to deliver aid and support to internally displaced Ukrainians. In addition, she is advancing legislation to promote women’s rights, to prevent and combat domestic violence and the protection of children. On 15 April 2022—52 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022—we spoke to Ionova about her priorities as an elected official in wartime, her view of the West’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine, and her predictions for how the war will end. This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity. Fig 1. Mariya Ionova 2022 © Mariya Ionova. CJLPA : When you were elected to be a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, did you ever imagine you would be serving your country during a time of war? Mariya Ionova : Yes and no. I was first elected in 2012, and I was very active in questions of European integration during the Revolution of Dignity and Euromaidan].[1] The war for us started in March 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and occupied Luhansk and Donetsk. The West did not want to escalate the war by putting boots on the ground. We had been fighting for six months and we were asking for sanctions. Russians were killing our people; I remember when President Petro Poroshenko [elected after Viktor Yanukovych’s removal] was working 24/7 on creating an international coalition and asked for a UN peacekeeping mission. He also worked on strengthening our Armed Forces together with our partners, and signed association agreements: legislative agreements to put the European Union and NATO integration into our constitution. This was a strategic course in his presidency. Because of this, when Russia invaded Ukraine again on 24 February of this year, we did not falter. Our armed forces, Ukrainian people, government, and Parliament work in solidarity, and we are brave. After that, we visited the front lines in Eastern Ukraine and meet regularly with IDPs [internally displaced persons] to provide humanitarian assistance. On 24 February, we were expecting war. But we did not expect such horror, such inhumanity, such cruelty, that there would be such crimes against women and children, girls and boys. Pure brutality. You can’t find the words when you see a seven-year-old boy watching his mother get raped and dying. Today, my colleagues and I are not only Members of Parliament, but we’re also volunteers in our communities. We are people who love our nation, our country, we love our people. And we are full of rage at the same time. We will not be OK until this settles in the courts. We need justice. We are working on the diplomatic front, on humanitarian aid and securing weapons for our military. Fig 2. In the town of Avdiivka, (left to right) Iryna Geraschenko (MP), Rebecca Harms (MEP) and Mariya Ionova (MP) 2022 © Mariya Ionova. CJLPA : Without sharing any details that might put you or your loved ones at risk, what steps have you taken to protect your safety and the safety of your family? MI : On 23 February I was in Parliament, and I felt it was wrong that my family was at home in Kyiv. I really couldn’t function at work from worry. So, in the evening, I called Myron [husband Myron Wasylyk, a Ukrainian-American advisor to the CEO of Naftogaz of Ukraine] and said ‘please be ready in one hour, we’re leaving for Western Ukraine’. When we arrived at five in the morning in Lviv the day after, the bombing started in Kyiv. My mom and aunt also arrived two days later, and then I went back to Kyiv while my family stayed in Lviv, and then to the Ukrainian/Hungarian border. I am worried about my mother; she has cancer and now must look after my children while my husband and I fight for Ukraine. Since then, I’ve been travelling to Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Ivano-Frankivsk. We are donating humanitarian aid from the USA and Canada. In our party [European Solidarity], we have a network of women that I work with closely: Jana Zinkevych, Sophia Fedyna, Nina Yuzhanina, Tac, Viktoriya Sumar, Iryna Gerashchenko, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, and Iryna Friz . They are all strong, intelligent, and brave women. I’m so proud of these women, but it’s also heart-breaking what they’re doing. Iryna Friz, the first Minister of Veterans in Ukraine, in the past 53 days of the war, has sourced 328+ tonnes of humanitarian aid for Ukraine, including bulletproof vests. I don’t think about my security. I have my responsibilities and I must do them. There is no safe place in Ukraine. Today in Lviv, seven people including a small child were already killed and 15 badly wounded. My father and my brothers are in Kyiv, they are volunteers in different places. The men are trying to do what they can. CJLPA : As a Parliamentarian, in a time of war, with the country under martial law, what are the most important actions the Parliament is and should be taking right now? MI : Now our priorities are hostages and civilian hostages. There are more than 1,000 civilian hostages, and 500 of those are women, including local representatives, journalists, and civil activists. The conditions for them are not, shall we say, according to the Geneva Convention. They need medical attention. On this list of hostages is paramedic Yulia “Tayra” Payevska—her daughter Anna-Sofia Puzanova won a bronze medal at the Invictus Games. Yulia was working as a paramedic in Mariupol from the first days, and the Russians kidnapped her. We must highlight her name. They’ve made up stories about her. It’s just terrible. We also have a list of 40 children who were kidnapped and taken to Russia, most of them from Mariupol. We know the exact address of where they are in Russia. But these children have relatives in Ukraine. One boy, Ilya, his mother was killed in Mariupol, but his grandmother is in Uzhhorod. Another boy, Maksym, 15, is an orphan who was studying in college in Mariupol and was wounded. He also has relatives in Ukraine. Another girl, 12-year-old Kira Obedinksy, her father Yevhen Obedinksy was the former captain of the Ukrainian men’s water polo team, and he was killed in Mariupol. She’s been taken to Donetsk, and they want to give her to a Russian family, but Kira has a grandfather in Ukraine. Each has a personal story. As mothers we all can imagine our own children in these stories. This problem has to be named: Russia is a country that is kidnapping children. Fig 3. Near Mariupol in Shirokino, 809 metres from an enemy fire point. Members of Ukrainian Parliament (left to right) Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Iryna Geraschenko, Mariya Ionova, with Ukrainian soldiers 2022 © Mariya Ionova. CJLPA : We have heard reports from Ukraine’s government and the media about atrocities being committed against Ukraine’s people—executions, rape, abductions. What can you tell us about the situation on the ground that Ukraine’s allies may not be aware of? MI : The list of 40 children represents those where we have the exact address where they are being held, where we have a complete history and detailed information. But there are many, many more cases where we don’t yet have all the details. Especially in occupied territories, to which of course we don’t have access. All we have on those cases is information that the Ministry of Defence is collecting, and that which the Ombudswoman on Human Rights gets on their phone hotline [about missing or kidnapped individuals]. There are over 4,000 criminal cases that are open but, unfortunately, we don’t have the volume of legal professionals to prosecute them all. There are still bodies that have still not been identified after 50 days of war. Where there is rape of women and children, 99 percent of these victims are not ready to speak to law enforcement institutions, they are afraid to speak now. And that’s also a problem. But we are asking our international partners for assistance. There has also been evidence that people are dying of starvation and dehydration. In Mariupol, in Bucha, there are elderly people who have been blocked in their houses for weeks. In Bucha, they were finding that [Russian troops] killed families, five bodies in a yard. In all, thousands killed. We have to get all this documented and get this to the International Court, and it has to be punished. That’s why we are calling this a genocide. Fig 4. Members of Ukrainian Parliament Mariya Ionova and Iryna Geraschenko in front of a bombed building 2022 © Mariya Ionova. CJLPA : How would you rate the response from the international community so far to these atrocities? MI : All the European countries and America were teaching us about democratic values [before Russia’s latest invasion]. Now it’s their turn to show us how they defend those values. It is the responsibility of the free world. If they will not help us, he [Putin] will not stop. He has 150 million people. He doesn’t care how many Russian people will be killed. And he will go further. There are no red lines for him. The free world was not ready to defend their values. They didn’t have a strategy. Our strategy is that Russia must be defeated, Putin must be punished. He is a war criminal. The Western community is not ready for this. For us, there is no grey, only black and white. We are paying with our lives. That is why we are demanding weapons to defend ourselves. So, we say, ok, if you won’t give us a no-fly zone, at least give us military equipment. The problem is all these countries waited to give us assistance. They were sure we would fail. That is why they didn’t have a strategy of support for us. When we showed the whole world that we fight, when we showed our resistance, we understood that they don’t have a strategy on Russia. They would like to trade with Russia as business as usual. And we also heard realpolitik. Now realpolitik is the whole world watching online how we have been raped and tortured and killed. CJLPA : How should the world be supporting Ukraine? MI : Our humanitarian request is weapons. We don’t need masks, soap, food when we are under shelling, under bombardment. We need weapons. And sanctions. There are 330 Russian banks. Do you know how many were turned off from SWIFT? Six. Now after Bucha they increased, but not 330. They find loopholes. Why didn’t they sanction sooner? What about Russian information sources? Why are we not expelling Russian diplomats? At least half of them? And we still have discussions in the United Nations, to be or not to be. He [Putin] uses this weakness. He’s inspired by this weakness. I understand democratic procedures, but he is going crazy. He’s killing and attacking every day. Where is international order? Where are international rules? Why are we five steps behind? Why is he making the rules, setting the agenda? Why not strong democratic countries? What are you waiting for? CJLPA : Do you believe Ukraine will win this war against Russia? MI : We have already won. By spirit, by unity in our country. By being a brave nation. We will not fail. The alternative is we will be killed. We will not give up. This is why we’ve already won. We hear [Russia’s] is the second biggest army in the world, and our army has shown that when you have spirit and love and value freedom, you will fight. It’s a historical chance for all the world. We have repeated this historical circle for centuries. We need to get other nations to help prevent this and this criminal Putin, and that’s why we’re asking other countries that he needs to be completely isolated from the free world. And if the free world wants to do this, it’s their choice. But we will not give up. There is no alternative for us. What he’s doing to Mariupol, he will do with the whole of Ukraine. He wants to erase us from the whole world—our genes, our language, our land, our history. World—are you ready to respond? Fig 5. In Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s Parliament) Members of Ukrainian Parliament Mariya Ionova, Iryna Friz, Iryna Geraschenko, and Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze 2021 © Mariya Ionova. CJLPA : What else do you think Western audiences need to know about Ukraine? MI : The whole set of war crimes that are being committed in Ukraine now. We are not blaming the world. We are not making accusations. Everyone makes their choice. But if we all together share the same values and principles, then all together we need not only words, but also actions. We must be united and fight. We are committed to this fight because we don’t see another way. To be under the Russian Federation? No way! In Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin thought those were his people, but people were saying, no, we want to be here in Ukraine. You see, in Kherson, Putin failed. Ukraine is in favour of being our own country. We are a European, Atlantic country, in the European family. But if European countries share such values, they need to step up. We will do it ourselves if we need to, but the casualties will be huge. It’s a question of security for the whole world. We are protecting the European Eastern border with our lives. We appreciate that all the world is standing with Ukrainians. But words are not enough. We appreciate words, but we need action. We are fighting for the world. Russia’s war is against NATO also, it is against democracy. The best security guarantee is NATO membership. In this regard, I would like to take this opportunity and wholeheartedly thank the British people and the British government for their clear position on supporting Ukraine…and this position is becoming strong and stronger. Together we will prevail and of course Ukraine will win! This interview was conducted by Yevdokia Sokil and Constance Uzwyshyn. Constance is an expert on Ukrainian contemporary art. She founded Ukraine’s first foreign-owned professional art gallery, the ARTEast Gallery, in Kyiv. Having written a masters dissertation entitled The Emergence of the Ukrainian Contemporary Art Market , she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge researching Ukrainian contemporary art. She is also CJLPA 2’s Executive Editor and the Ukrainian Institute of London’s Creative Industries Advisor. [1] Protests over then-President Volodymyr Yanukovich’s decision not to proceed with European Union integration in favour of closer ties with Russia, that resulted in his removal in 2014.

There exists a fine line that sociologists—and all social scientists—must tread as they try to knit together empirical, objective[1] evidence and participants’ subjective realities. It is not an either/or situation. It is not a very easy path to walk down. But it must be done—not only by sociologists, but by all of us. I argue that working out how to value both objective and subjective realities is a central step we must take if we are to move towards a more compassionate society. And a step that we must not leave to junior researchers or postgraduate students to take, but which must be emphasised to undergraduates as they begin their research. To illustrate how I came to this understanding, I think it is instructive to consider one of my own research experiences. When interviewing a research participant on Zoom a few weeks ago, I found myself particularly struck by something this participant said. Whilst I cannot say exactly what this comment was (the research project is ongoing), I was bewildered at the way a young woman, whose candour and generosity I admired and appreciated, seemed to be denying an aspect of the inequalities prevalent in university life. She denied something I believed I knew to be true. I found myself thinking ‘but that’s a myth’ so ‘you’re wrong’, ‘you’ve been duped’, ‘you’re misinformed’. I even fleetingly considered that my interviewee was under a form of ‘false consciousness’, the sociological equivalent to ‘you’re wrong and I’m right—but you can’t see it’. It is in order to avoid instances like this in the future, instances where the power dynamics between interviewee and interviewer are at risk of sullying the integrity of the research, that I propose a route towards a more compassionate sociology, one that remains both critical and empowering. Fortunately, however, I recalled that the growing refrain within the discipline of sociology is ‘reflexivity, reflexivity, reflexivity’. Reflexivity means being alert to and examining your own assumptions, views, and social location within structures and relations of power; it is central to good sociological research. This incident raised the question of how I should represent this participant’s views in my work. I considered the option of turning to the corpus of sociological work demonstrating why she is wrong and, in the process, take away her autonomy and devalue her views. Or, I could take her own perspective at face value, ignoring the empirical evidence to the contrary. The truth is that neither option is adequate. Instead, we must all seek to value objective and subjective realities simultaneously . Only then can we completely fulfil the requirement to be reflexive and, in turn, become more compassionate sociologists and, beyond that, citizens. Unable to detail this specific incident, I want to illustrate what I mean by applying this idea—of valuing both the objective and subjective simultaneously —to the mythological status of meritocracy. Meritocracy refers to the idea that intelligence and effort, rather than ascriptive traits, determine individuals’ social position and trajectory. I had previously believed meritocracy to be a ‘myth’ in the UK. Drawing on David Bidney’s definition of myth,[2] when referring to meritocracy as a myth, I mean that meritocracy is an idea or concept that is frequently discussed and often believed but, in reality, it is false because it has been shown to be incompatible with scientific and empirical evidence. Thinking about whether meritocracy is a myth is particularly pertinent in the context of COVID-19. With murmurs of ‘life after COVID-19’ and ‘a return to normal’, forms of government relief like eviction moratoriums and furlough schemes have been wound down or withdrawn completely. As these expanded safety nets are dismantled, it is likely that we will return to a government discourse of ‘meritocracy’ that positions the privileged as deserving of their dominance and wealth on the basis of ‘merit’, whilst the dominated and marginalised are rendered responsible for their own hardship because they are neither sufficiently talented nor conscientious. However, given that the fatal impacts of COVID-19 have exposed the persisting fault lines of structural inequality, with mounting death tolls, lockdown restrictions, and concomitant economic shocks disproportionately affecting the marginalised and dominated in society, particularly the working class and people of colour (many of whom are working-class), it raises the question of whether meritocracy was and is a myth. The meritocratic discourse: level playing fields and worthy winners Meritocracy, as popularised by Michael Young in 1958,[3] refers to the idea that ‘IQ+effort’, rather than ascriptive traits (such as class, race, gender, sexuality, or nationality), determine individuals’ social position and trajectory. The term has transformed from being a negative slur, as argued by Michael Young and Alan Fox, to a positive axiom of modern life.[4] Jo Littler argues this positive evaluation characterises contemporary neoliberal inflections of meritocracy that justify inequalities (conferring meritocratic legitimation) and which are underpinned by individualism and the linear, hierarchical ‘ladder of opportunity’.[5] The current prime minister’s narrative of ‘Levelling Up’ shows meritocratic discourse in action. It is largely a continuation of the rhetoric Boris Johnson deployed as Mayor of London, when he famously ‘hailed the Olympics for embodying the “Conservative lesson of life” that hard work leads to reward’—the effort part of the ‘IQ+effort’ meritocratic formula.[6] Perhaps most revealing of this meritocratic discourse is Johnson’s effusive article titled: ‘We should be humbly thanking the super-rich, not bashing them’.[7] In this article, he argued the super-rich deserve their wealth (meritocratic legitimation) on the basis of their ‘merit’, that is, their exceptional levels of intelligence, talent, and effort. Thus, he adopts a trope of meritocratic legitimation to justify the gross inequalities between the super-rich and the poor. The implication is that those at the bottom of the social ladder are to blame for their own position. Fellow Etonian, David Cameron, matches Johnson’s meritocratic rhetoric. Cameron’s ‘Aspiration Nation’ discourse similarly assumes all progressive movement must happen upwards, thereby positioning working-class culture as ‘abject zones and lives to flee from’.[8] This is epitomised by Cameron’s moralised binary opposition of ‘skiver’/ ‘striver’. The rhetorical construction of these social types denies structural (dis)advantage by ‘responsibilising’ solutions to inequality as an individual’s ‘ moral meritocratic task’.[9] Thus, meritocracy assumes a ‘level playing-field’ or ‘equality of opportunity’, whilst presenting a moralising discourse that blames or applauds individuals for their social position and erases the persistence of structural inequality. Meritocracy as myth: the following wind of privilege makes for an uneven playing field If meritocracy was regularly being touted by politicians, why, then, did I consider it to be a myth? To answer this question, we must consider how past and recent scholarship places meritocracy firmly in the realm of myth by showing it to be incompatible with scientific and empirical evidence. I limit my analysis here to class, despite literature on intersectionality showing that class does not exist apart from other axes of oppression. This focus reflects the long-standing British political obsession with class mobility and that literature on meritocracy has traditionally centred on class inequalities, whereby meritocracy is framed as achievement irrespective of material circumstances, for which class is perhaps the most pertinent lens. My sociological training at undergraduate level has instilled in me that meritocracy as an operational social system—where ‘IQ+effort’ is the basis of reward and resource allocation in society—is a myth. In traditional class analyses, such as that by Richard Breen and John Goldthorpe,[10] meritocracy is operationalised in terms of employment relations, analysing the relationship between class origins and destinations—coded by occupation—as illustrative of social mobility. Breen and Goldthorpe found that, in Britain, ‘merit’—measured as ability, effort, and/or educational attainment—does little to mediate the association between class origin and destination.[11] In other words, in order to enter similarly desirable class positions, children of less-advantaged origins need to show substantially more ‘merit’ than their privileged-origin counterparts. Meanwhile, the culturalist approach to class analysis, which emerged in direct response to the deficiencies of traditional class analysis, tells a similar story. A new generation of class theorists, notably Mike Savage and colleagues[12] alongside Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison,[13] criticised traditional class analysis’ narrow focus on occupational divisions in class reproduction to the exclusion of cultural processes and markers of inequality. The culturalist approach operationalises a Bourdieusian framework for understanding inequalities. As economic capital was seen as just one aspect of class reproduction, focus shifted to social capital and, especially, cultural capital which exists in three forms: objectified (cultural products, such as book or works of art); institutionalised (educational credentials), and embodied (enduring dispositions of mind and body, such as mannerisms, preferences, language). In particular, embodied cultural capital can illuminate how often ‘IQ+effort’ is not recognised as ‘merit’. Rather, ‘merit’ is read off the body through the ways individuals ‘ perform merit’: for instance, in mannerisms, language, accent, dress, and tastes. Possession of embodied cultural capital is structured by what Bourdieu refers to as the ‘habitus’: the set of pre-reflexive, pre-discursive dispositions an individual embodies, conditioned by their social position or ‘conditions of existence’ (proximity to material necessity). In this way, one’s habitus is classed. The ‘structure’ of the habitus generates ‘structuring’ dispositions, relating to a particular mode of perceiving, inhabiting, and knowing the social world, rooted ‘in’ the body, including posture, gesture, and taste – embodied cultural capital.[14] Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, following this culturalist approach, move beyond the traditional class analysis assumption that mobility finishes at the point of occupational entry. Instead, they view equitable access to the highest echelons of elite professions (such as law, medicine, engineering, journalism, and TV-broadcasting) as crucial to the actualisation of meritocracy: it is not just about who gets in, but who gets to the top. They interrogate inequalities in elite professions, finding that the probability of someone from upper-middle-class origins landing an elite job to be 6.5 times that of their counterpart from working-class origins.[15]They argue that differences in educational credentials cannot fully explain the stubborn links between class origins and destinations. Whilst there are class disparities in levels of education, the percentage of people with a degree or higher obtaining ‘top’ jobs is 27% for people of working-class origin and 39% for people of privileged origin.[16] These disparities reveal that even if people from working-class origins possess the credentials meritocratic discourse presents as necessary (‘IQ+effort’), class hierarchy within elite professions persists. Friedman and Laurison contend that cultural processes are the cause of these inequalities, thereby exposing the limits of Goldthorpe’s more economics-based approach. They argue that what is routinely categorised and recognised as ‘merit’ in elite occupations is ‘actually impossible to separate from the “following wind of privilege.”’[17] Rather than ensuring a level playing field, the assessment of ‘merit’ is based on arbitrary, classed criteria. For example, recognition of ‘merit’ depends on ‘polish’ in accountancy and ‘studied informality’ in television, both of which ‘pivot on a package of expectations—relating to dress, accent, taste, language and etiquette—that are strongly associated with or cultivated via a privileged upbringing’.[18] That is to say, in Bourdieu’s terms, performance of ‘merit’ requires a certain privileged habitus. This enables the already privileged to ‘cash in’ their ‘merit’ in a way that is unavailable to the working-class who, due to their class origins, do not possess the requisite cultural repertoire – embodied cultural capital, possession of which is structured by the habitus. The existence and differentiation of an inflexible and durable habitus thus means any universal, objective set of criteria that constitutes ‘merit’ is an impossibility as is the notion that anyone can possess this ‘merit’. Moreover, a privileged habitus is favoured through a process of ‘cultural-matching’ whereby a ‘fit’ between employer and employee is sought.[19] ‘Fit’ is based on relationships forged on cultural affinity which, due to the habitus, usually map onto shared class origins. Since those in senior positions are overwhelmingly from privileged backgrounds, cultural-matching enables the upper-middle classes to advance at the expense of the working-class. The process of cultural-matching becomes self-perpetuating. Yet, as it is couched in veiled meritocratic management jargon, such as ‘talent-mapping’, cultural-matching operates under the radar.[20] These homophilic bonds enable the privileged to ‘cash in’ their ‘merit’ in a way that is unavailable to the working-class who possess a habitus inscribed by proximity to necessity and thus lacking the required embodied cultural capital, producing experiences of ‘lack of fit’.[21] Whilst Friedman and Laurison do not explicitly make this connection, I follow Vandebroeck in seeing this ‘lack of fit’ as the corollary of how every habitus ‘seeks to create the conditions of its fulfilment’, meaning ‘that every habitus will seek to avoid those conditions in which it systematically finds itself questioned, problematised, stigmatised and devalued’.[22] For those of working-class origin, the resultant poor ‘fit’ leads to an ostensibly elective ‘self-elimination’ from elite occupations.[23] This ensures limited mobility between origins and destinations and suggests that something other than the meritocratic formula ‘IQ+effort’ is operating as the selection mechanism in elite professions . In other words, there is no point talking about a level playing-field when the wind is blowing so strongly in one direction. Meritocracy thus appears as a myth on the level of empirical, structural reality. Whilst academic research thus evidences the mythical status of meritocracy as an empirical reality, the state of affairs in politics and the media also encourage similar conclusions. Whilst only 6.5% of the general population attends fee-paying schools, 54% of Johnson’s cabinet were privately educated (as of July 2019). The equivalent number for May’s 2016 cabinet was 30%; Cameron’s 2015 cabinet was 50%; the coalition 2010 cabinet was 62%. Even in Labour cabinets the privately educated were overrepresented: 32% in both Brown’s 2007 and Blair’s 1997 cabinet.[24] Similarly, a 2019 Ofcom report found that television workers were twice as likely than the average Briton to have attended private schools.[25] The Panic! 2015 survey also found that, of those in film, television, and radio, only 12.4% have working-class origins, compared to 38% of the general population.[26] All of this evidence seems to point to an undeniable status of meritocracy as myth. A belief in a myth?: ‘the playing-field looks fine to me’ These academic findings and research statistics, published in peer-reviewed journals and fact-checked news outlets, are considered reliable, valid, and largely unambiguous. Yet significant swathes of the population continue to believe in meritocracy. Only 14% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey regarded family wealth as important to getting ahead and only 8% saw ethnicity as a decisive factor—a fall from 21% and 16% in 1987. Meanwhile, 84% and 71% believed ‘hard work’ and ‘ambition’ were important to getting ahead. This high level of belief in meritocracy may have even increased in recent years. In 2018, Jonathan Mijs found that the recent rise of income inequality has been accompanied by an increase in popular belief in meritocracy internationally.[27] If meritocracy is believed on a significant scale, how can such beliefs be sustained despite contradictory evidence? It is especially important to ask the question of why those who appear to lose out, precisely because meritocracy is nothing more than a guise for persisting class prejudices, are persuaded by the idea that meritocracy is a true functioning system of reward and resource allocation in our society. Elites have obvious stakes in believing and perpetuating belief in meritocracy if it works to justify their power as deserved and legitimate on the basis of intelligence, talent, and effort. Therefore, I will focus on the so-called losers of meritocracy, or ‘skivers’ in Cameron’s classist parlance. In order to move towards a more compassionate sociology, it is insufficient simply to look at whether or not meritocracy exists, or how far ingrained prejudices prevent it from being realised. Rather, we also need to take into account the subjective responses to meritocracy of those we study. Failing to consider simultaneously the objective and subjective realities of meritocracy means we risk seeing those who believe in it as cultural dupes in a state of ignorance and delusion. Whilst this kind of disempowering analysis can be seen in some sociological writings,[28] there is nevertheless a body of scholars whose work actively seeks to contest and move beyond this. The work of Wendy Bottero on social inequalities and of Lauren Berlant on her concepts of ‘cruel optimism’ has shaped my thinking on this and both are discussed briefly below.[29] Robbie Duschinsky and colleagues also provide a way through these thorny issues when discussing the psychiatric concept of ‘flat affect’. They argue against the totalising resistance/compliance binary in the social sciences and humanities that is ‘too quick to divide actions into compliance with or resistance to power’.[30] They contend that this binary obscures the many strategies individuals engage in to negotiate ‘compromised, valuable freedom’ in conditions not of their own choosing. Whilst this scholarship is crucial, students—particularly undergraduates—have to seek out this work as it is not part of most compulsory syllabi. Even in optional modules and papers, it is often only touched on briefly and indirectly in discussions of researcher reflexivity. Meanwhile, the objective and ‘scientific’ nature of social sciences seem to be a crucial lynchpin around which all undergraduate learning turns. Alternatively, the student has to be lucky enough to have a supervisor that will guide them in this direction. I believe research would become not only more nuanced, but more compassionate, if scholarship like that of Bottero, Berlant, and Duschinsky, and the notion of valuing objective and subjective realities simultaneously, became a staple of undergraduate sociology courses. More than this, it would help us become more compassionate people outside of the classroom and lecture hall too. Favouring objective, empirical evidence, which points to the nonexistence of meritocracy, over subjective feeling and meaning-making means failing to consider the seduction and benefit of meritocratic belief in providing meaning and order to one’s life. Christopher Paul overcomes this problem, recognising that meritocratic belief is ‘understood as a great liberator, freeing citizens from an aristocratic past based on inheritance and lineage’.[31] Given this historical reference point, meritocracy is consented to as it seems ‘fair’ and ‘just’. However, because meritocracy structurally disadvantages the dominated (working-classes), such belief can be characterised as a ‘cruel optimism’. Lauren Berlant conceptualises ‘cruel optimism’ as the affective state produced under neoliberalism which encourages optimistic attachments to a brighter, better future, whilst these same attachments and beliefs are simultaneously ‘an obstacle to our flourishing’.[32] In other words, meritocratic belief can provide a sense of hope which is difficult to argue with.[33] Berlant recognises this process of meaning-making through belief, arguing that hope can bind together a chaotic neoliberal world ‘into a space made liveable…even if that hope never materialises’,[34] just as hope for meritocracy as a structural reality may never materialise. A myth as fact? On the one hand, we have seen that empirical evidence suggests that the recognition and categorisation of ‘merit’ is based more on possession of classed embodied cultural capital than on ‘IQ+effort’; meritocracy as an objective social system is a myth. On the other hand, belief in the meritocratic formula at a subjective level is clearly not mythical, but a strong ideological force in British society. The existence of belief in the meritocratic formula at a subjective level means we cannot label meritocracy ‘just a myth’ and proceed with our analysis heedlessly. As David Bidney recognised as early as 1950, ‘the very fact of belief implies that subjectively, that is, for the believer, the object of belief is not mythological’, but ‘an effective element of culture’.[35] Ultimately, if people find meaning and sense in a meritocratic idiom, acting on the basis of meritocratic belief, sociologists must be cautious in imposing alternative categorisations and identifications in the teeth of lay peoples’ denials. This is exactly what almost occurred when I was interviewing a research participant a few weeks ago. Thus, meritocracy is a myth at an objective level, but also exists as ideology, meaning subjective belief in this ideology is far from a myth in British society. Because believed true, meritocracy is not a myth to those who believe it, but a myth only to those who know and believe it to be false. This brings us to the problem of why, so long as some people believe in meritocracy, it is impossible to unproblematically label it as a myth despite research suggesting meritocracy has no empirical reality. I draw here on conceptualisations of ideology. Since meritocracy comprises a system of beliefs constituting a general worldview that works to uphold particular power dynamics between the dominant (presented as the deserving ‘winners’ of meritocracy) and the dominated (presented as unmeritocratic and undeserving), it operates as an ideology.[36] Michael Freeden extends this view, defining ideology as ‘particular patterned clusters and configurations’ of decontested ‘political concepts’ not external to but existing within the world.[37] This is helpful for two reasons. Firstly, the notion that ideology exists within the world highlights how ideologies have material effects: if believed, they influence how we act and behave, as seen in processes of ‘self-elimination’ (whereby individuals from marginalised or dominated backgrounds do not enter elite jobs, not because they lack ambition or aspiration, but as a reaction to or an anticipation of the kinds of barriers they will face there).[38] Moreover, belief in meritocracy—that we had lost our meritocratic way and needed to recapture it—is, David Goodhart argues, at the heart of the contemporary anti-elitist, populist challenge.[39] This belief in meritocracy was an underlying part of both Trump’s and Brexit’s appeal, political changes that re-organised and shaped the world in which all must participate. Therefore, even if meritocracy is a structural mirage, belief in it as ideology still has material, real-world effects. Sociologists, then, seem to have an additional task. It can no longer suffice to evidence the absence of meritocracy as a functioning social system in society. That is to dismiss it as a myth and to overlook these real-world effects. Instead, sociologists need to grapple with the more complex and less neatly categorised implications of the persistent belief in meritocracy, even by those it disadvantages. I agree with Stuart Hall, one of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies, that ideology ‘concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of the masses and thereby become “a material force”’[40] and I suggest that scholars who dismiss meritocracy as myth fall prey to the mistaken traditional philosophical distinction between thought and action, isolating them in separate, impermeable spheres with potentially deleterious consequences. Secondly, in Freeden’s theory of ideology, we are presented with the notion that there is no ‘absolute truth’ since all concepts are ‘essentially contestable’, with as many potential meanings of concepts and ideas as there are human minds.[41] Whilst this is a rather extreme and destabilising stance, it highlights how belief is subjective, contextualised, and personalised, meaning meritocracy cannot be completely and unequivocally tarred with the brush of mythology. These two points—that meritocratic belief has real-world effects and meritocratic belief as subjective reality—highlight why, so long as some people believe in it, meritocracy cannot merely be a myth . Bottero argues that ‘the asymmetrical distribution of resources tends to worry sociologists more than it worries lay actors’, suggesting that ‘discussion of such issues must draw on the language of perceived injustice and conflict which emerges from people themselves’.[42] However, the language of injustice and conflict does not always and for everyone refer to meritocracy. Rather, meritocracy is instead often spoken of in terms of legitimate inequality. Towards a more compassionate sociology – and beyond? We cannot deny that sociology (and social sciences more broadly) is and should remain an empirical discipline, but nor can we deny that an approach which puts greater emphasis on lay actors’ own beliefs and consequent action is also within sociology’s remit. Indeed, an important tenet of sociological training is the ‘Thomas Theorem’ : ‘If [people] define their situations as real, they are real in their consequences’.[43] This is a tenet that seems to be offered to students and young researchers only after their undergraduate studies, and even then it is not always followed. Instead, this tenet should become crucial to any undergraduate sociological training. Sociologists and other social scientists must continue to analyse and expose how power is operating and so cannot take people’s own perspectives at face value since they may potentially ‘misrecognise’ the power inequalities experienced. Yet social scientists must also avoid, as Berlant puts it, ‘shit[ting] on people who hold to a dream’.[44] What I have been arguing for here is a sociology that avoids this by making the distinction between the objective, empirical myth of meritocracy as a social structural system (based on the ‘IQ+effort’ formula), and belief in meritocracy as a subjective reality which is not a myth because it has real-world effects on and meanings for people’s lives. Consequently, meritocratic belief becomes a material force that can only be confined to the mythological sphere at the price of a limited understanding of the real-world effects it has . That is, meritocracy may be a myth to some, including many sociologists, but it is an integral cultural element for many. This two-pronged argument that calls for encompassing objective and subjective realities simultaneously extends beyond the issue of meritocracy. For example, it can help us understand why women—not just men—believe that gender equality has been achieved. It can help us understand why people hold onto conspiracy theories. It can help us understand why people in urban, developed cities practice witchcraft or spend hours logging sightings of UFOs, to name just a few. Reflecting on this conclusion is crucial given social sciences’ (like sociology, law, and politics) tendency to focus on empirical reality, rather than subjective belief. Without the latter, simple conclusions that meritocracy is merely a myth or that my research participant was merely suffering from ‘false consciousness’ risk alienating and dismissing the existence of many whose lives take meaning and action from such beliefs. What this essay ultimately aims to do, therefore, is to caution social scientists, particularly undergraduate students, in their analysis and exposure of objective reality, to not dismiss point-blank individuals’ subjective reality. Whilst researchers must always be awake to power dynamics that may go unnoticed by the individuals they study, this essay suggests sociology (and other social sciences) perhaps needs to be more reflexive, aware that its claims to inclusivity and criticalness may be undermined as its empirically focussed, objectivity-driven approach risks ostracising the very people who, in its aim to bring inequalities to the forefront, it intends to empower. This idea, that we must avoid shitting on those who believe in a dream, despite empirical evidence of its nonexistence, should not just be taken up by sociologists, but by all of us. As this essay has outlined, it can help us—academics and students in elite institutions especially—understand why people voted for Trump or Brexit, for instance. It will stop us from dismissing and even dehumanising others point-blank and instead open up channels of empathy, compassion, and communication, something which I hope will be present in all my future research interviews and which I fear was not present in the interview that sparked this essay. Niamh Hodges Niamh Hodges graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in summer 2022, where she received a first class degree in Human, Social and Political Sciences (HSPS). Interested in the convergence between sociology, politics and law, she intends to pursue a Masters and career in social work. [1] It is implicit throughout this essay that completely ‘objective’ evidence is impossible to achieve given the influence of the researcher on research outcomes, but the term is used here as objective knowledge remains the ideal across large swathes of the social science community. [2] David Bidney, ‘The Concept of Myth and the Problem of Psychocultural Evolution’ (1950) 52(1) American Anthropologist 16. [3] Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033: An essay on education and society (Thames and Hudson 1958). [4] ibid; Alan Fox, ‘Class and Equality’ (May 1956) Socialist Commentary 11; Richard Herrnstein, IQ in the Meritocracy (Little, Brown 1971) and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (Basic Books 1973). Also see Jo Littler, Against Meritocracy: culture, power and myths of mobility (Routledge 2018). [5] Littler (n 4) 8. [6] Geri Peev, ‘Games Embody the Tory Ethic of Hard Work that Leads to Reward, Says Boris’, Daily Mail (London, 6 August 2012) < www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-2184687/Boris-Johnson-London-2012-Olympics-embody-Tory-ethic-hardwork-leads-reward.html#ixzz2QG4E5oVC >. [7] Boris Johnson, ‘We should be humbly thanking the super-rich, not bashing them’, The Telegraph (London, 17 November 2013) < https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/0/should-humbly-thanking-super-rich-not-bashing/ >. [8] Littler (n 4) 7. [9] ibid 89–90. [10] Richard Breen and John Goldthorpe, ‘Class Inequality and Meritocracy: A Critique of Saunders and an Alternative Analysis’ (1999) 50(1) British Journal of Sociology 1; Richard Breen and John Goldthorpe, ‘Class, Mobility and Merit: The Experience of Two British Birth Cohorts’ (2001) 17(2) European Sociological Review 81; Erzsébet Bukodi, John Goldthorpe, Lorraine Waller, and Jouni Kuha, ‘The mobility problem in Britain: New findings from the analysis of birth cohort data’ (2015) 66(1) British Journal of Sociology 93. [11] Breen and Goldthorpe, ‘Class, Mobility and Merit’ (n 10). [12] Mike Savage, Niall Cunningham, Fiona Devine, Sam Friedman, Daniel Laurison, Lisa McKenzie, Andrew Miles, Helene Snee, and Paul Wakeling, Social Class in the 21st Century (Pelican Books 2015). [13] Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays To Be Privileged (Bristol University Press 2019). [14] Dieter Vandebroeck, Distinctions in the Flesh (Routledge 2017). [15] Friedman and Laurison (n 13) 13. [16] ibid. [17] ibid 27. [18] ibid 213. [19] ibid. [20] Friedman and Laurison (n 13) 211. [21] ibid 218. [22] Vandebroeck (n 14) 220. [23] Friedman and Laurison (n 13). [24] BBC News, ‘Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Does his cabinet reflect “modern Britain”?’ (25 July 2019) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49034735 >. [25] Ofcom (2019) Breaking the class ceiling—social make-up of the TV industry revealed . [26] Dave O’Brien, Orian Brook, and Mark Taylor, ‘Panic! Social class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries’ (2018) < https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/panic-social-class-taste-and-inequalities-in-the-creative-industries(0994f056-af25-4615-b97c-d8adc190d5b4).html >; Ofcom (n 26). [27] Jonathan Mijs, ‘Visualising Belief in Meritocracy, 1930–2010’ (2018) 4 Socius 1. [28] I contend that such analysis is seen in Littler (n 4) and that many Bourdieusian analyses edge very close to falling into this trap as well, such as Friedman and Laurison (n 13). [29] Wendy Bottero, ‘Class Identities and the Identity of Class’ (2004) 38(5) Sociology 985, and A Sense of Inequality (Rowman and Littlefield International 2018); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press 2011). [30] Robbie Duschinsky, Daniel Reisel, and Morten Nissen, ‘Compromised, Valuable Freedom: Flat Affect and Reserve as Psychosocial Strategies’ (2018) 11(1) Journal of Psychosocial Studies 68. [31] Christopher Paul, The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the Worst. (University of Minnesota Press 2018) 44–45. [32] Berlant (n 29) 1. [33] Naa Oyo A Kwate and Ilhan H Meyer, ‘The Myth of Meritocracy and African American Health’ (2010) 100(10) American Journal of Public Health 1831. [34] Chase Dimock, ‘‘Cruel Optimism’ by Lauren Berlant’ Lambda Literary (30 July 2012) < https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2012/07/cruel-optimism-by-lauren-berlant/ >. [35] Bidney (n 2) 22. [36] Jo Littler, ‘Ideology’ in Jonathan Gray and Laurie Oullette (eds), Keywords for Media Studies (New York University Press 2017) 98. [37] Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford University Press 1996). [38] Friedman and Laurison (n 13). [39] David Goodhart (2017) cited in David Civil and Joseph J Himsworth, ‘Introduction: Meritocracy in Perspective. The Rise of the Meritocracy 60 Years On’ (2020) 91(2) The Political Quarterly 373, 376. [40] Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees’ in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge 1996) 26. [41] Freeden (n 37) 53. [42] Bottero, ‘Class Identities’ (n 29) 995. [43] WI Thomas and DS Thomas, The Child in America: Behaviour Problems and Programs (Knopf 1928) 572. [44] Berlant (n 29) 123.

Introduction In Zoe Leonard’s photograph of Fae Richards and June Walker, two women wrap their arms around each other and gaze lovingly into the other’s eyes. The caption dates the photograph to 1955, Richards’s forty-seventh birthday at their shared home. It reads, ‘Fae and June met while Fae was singing at the Standard. June sat at a stageside table every night for months, always with a white rose for Fae. By 1947, they were living together, and they lived together until Fae’s death’.[1] The photograph itself evinces its age through its weathered appearance: the bottom right-hand corner is ripped and the surface is lined with scratches. The scene is mundane, yet two Black lesbians living and loving happily together in the 1950s is extraordinary. Fae Richards and June Walker never existed. They were fabricated by Cheryl Dunye to account for a history written out of the archives. If 2SLGBTQ+ people do appear in the dominant archive, it is only through a heteronormative gaze that either condemns or erases them. The absent archive has always posed epistemological and political challenges. Marginalised communities—those that have been strategically erased from the dominant archive—are left with little history to draw on in the struggle of resistance. The archive, as both a theoretical and material locus of power, is troublesome for marginalised groups that are alienated from vectors of power. Saidiya Hartman’s seminal essay, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, deals with these issues in relation to archives of slavery. Hartman illustrates how histories of erasure necessitate different archival methods. In the essay, Hartman introduces the notion of ‘critical fabulation:’ using archival research alongside fictional narratives to rewrite and give new life to voices that are absent from the dominant archive. Critical fabulation is the process of working with and against the archive in order to transgress and extend its borders, thereby de-stabilizing the imbued authority of the archive. More specifically, critical fabulation elucidates what, by virtue of the archive, has failed to survive. In this essay, I will extend critical fabulation to the realm of contemporary art in order to conceive of 2SLGBTQ+ contemporary artists as archivists of the queer community.[2] I will interrogate the role of critical fabulation in creating what I will call a ‘counter-archive’, an archive that subverts authority and practices of power. I will question how practices of remembrance differ for a marginalised group from the practices of the traditional institutional archive. That is, as accounts of resistance, what modes of representation are taken up by queer counter archives? I will reveal how histories of erasure necessitate creative and imaginative archival methods, exhibiting how contemporary queer artists mine the archive in order to disrupt the authority granted to it as a speaker for History. I will situate my analysis in relation to the works of Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, Wu Tsang, and fierce pussy[3]; all of whom produce a counter-archive in their work through their use of experimental archival methods and critical fabulation. In 1996, Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye published The Fae Richards Photo Archive alongside Dunye’s film, Watermelon Woman . Dunye’s ‘documentary’ outlines her search into the history of an African American lesbian actress, Fae Richards; or, as she was billed in movies, the ‘Watermelon Woman’. Richards, however, was entirely fabricated by Dunye in order to supplant a lost history. Leonard shot photographs in which Dunye’s friends pose as Richards, as well as her friends, lovers, and family. In doing so, Leonard blurs the line between Dunye’s personal archive and that of Richards. Leonard and Dunye, thus, use critical fabulation to give voice to erased and forgotten Black lesbians. In doing so, they reveal the extent to which fiction is a necessary tool when archiving queer culture, and propose a new understanding of truth, memory, and the purpose of the archive. Tsang, as a transgender woman, similarly interrogates which histories are carried forward, and by whom. In this paper, I will focus on her work for the 2012 Whitney Biennial: an installation entitled Green Room . Green Room functioned as a dressing room for Biennial participants and was also opened to museum visitors when not in use. Inside, Tsang had constructed a two-channel video environment, with the two screens placed on perpendicular walls. She screened her documentary Que Paso Con Los Martes? , which recounts the story of a transgender woman who immigrated from Honduras to Los Angeles and found community in a local Latino gay bar, the Silver Platter. Tsang’s installation takes inspiration from the Silver Platter in its decor to invite viewer participation in the three-dimensional environment. Tsang, then, explores ways of recording queer history through a documentary-like style while, equally, implicating her audience through the fabricated setting. She draws attention to the distinctions between private and public space, as well as the infiltration of queer safe spaces. I will argue that Tsang’s dissolving and blurring of boundaries—the public and private; the fabricated and the real; two-dimensional and three-dimensional—is necessary to the production of a queer counter-archive. The final group of artists I will be grounding my analysis in is fierce pussy: an artist collective formed by queer women in 1991. Their emergence in the midst of the AIDS crisis informs their project to advocate for 2SLGBTQ+ rights and visibility through their work. Their installations were often public and site-specific, using unconventional materials such as billboards, street signs, and toilet paper in order to integrate their message into various facets of everyday life. I am interested in how their work is suffused with activism, mourning, and memorialization. I will centre two of their projects: For the Record and gutter . Both engage in critical fabulation by different means: For the Record imagines a future for those who died from AIDS; gutter edits and rewrites lesbian pulp fiction novels from the 1940s to the 1970s. fierce pussy, therefore, throws into question the heteronormative lens through which the archive has been constructed. To begin, it is necessary to outline what is at stake in this project. Archives are vital for ongoing queer survival and to our lives in the present.[4] A queer counter-archive provides the grounds for imagining queer futures and helps to situate queer identity—both past and present. Nayland Blake’s article, ‘Curating in a Different Light’, reveals how queer people do not have access to a private history, and hence require a public one. Blake writes, ‘Queer people are the only minority whose culture is not transmitted within the family’.[5] In that vein, the 2SLGBTQ+ community has needed to find new strategies to uncover and transmit our histories. Historical erasure and ongoing systemic oppression drastically impacts the ability for 2SLGBTQ+ people to accept and live our queer identities. The past has a continuous hold on, and shapes, our present. To live in the reverberations of this violence, as queer bodies, means to feel those effects and affects acutely. An artistic revisioning of histories of erasure, then, fosters precedence for the ongoing struggle to live one’s queer identity. Thus, a counter-archival project reimagines the past in order to create a livable present, and is integral to both individual and collective processes of healing. Memory, Mourning, and Marginalisation The archive is the ground upon which knowledge is formed and hierarchized; it reveals choices of inclusion and exclusion that are linked to access to power. I will ground my definition of the archive, and its relationship to power, in Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault’s respective analyses. Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, in the seminal text, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, trace the Western archive back to Ancient Greece and the rule of law. The term archive derives from the Greek arkheion , about which Derrida writes, ‘initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded’.[6] The etymological root of the archive, then, has two meanings: first, as a structure that houses objects and documents, and second, as the residence of those who command and speak on behalf of the law. The law is the place where people are recognized as agents or not and where personhood is made legible. Therefore, the archive is the house of power and holds authority over memorial processes. Foucault, in a similar way, locates power in the archive in his essay, ‘The Historical a priori and the Archive’. Likewise, Foucault describes the archive as the constraints imposed on what is sayable, or as he calls it, ‘enunciable’. That is, the archive governs the conditions of power that we inherit. The archive promises agency, and yet, at every turn, denies it. It suggests control over the ordering processes, but only so long as they adhere to historically contingent, pre-existing rules. Foucault states the following: ‘The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearances of statements as unique events’.[7] Hence, the archive reveals the conditions of power in which we find ourselves. It is a site in which we can pose questions about how we inherit and perpetuate power. Moreover, the archive is both the system that exercises control over what can be said, as well as the processes surrounding how things are understood. The archive, therefore, is not merely an institution or a site, but rather it is the practice of power. Accordingly, when I refer to a counter-archive, I mean processes that subvert the authority and the ordering processes of the traditional archive. It is necessary to leave this definition vague if we are to resist replicating the methods of the traditional archive. As elucidated by Foucault, the archive imposes a set of conditions upon the sayable in order to preserve discourse that aligns with dominant power structures, casting aside challenges to those structures. In this case, brevity and linearity factor into the reproduction of power because they help create a self-contained narrative and serve to separate the past from the present. Rather than utilising the archive’s documentation processes—that inevitably efface certain histories—artists engage in creative projects that reconstitute our understanding of the archive. James E Young’s essay, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, is useful for understanding what I mean when I say ‘counter-archive’. Young explores the role of counter-monuments in memorializing the Holocaust and the emergence of the memorial aesthetic in post-war Germany. Traditional monuments tend to memorialize victory, which brings Young to question the way in which Germany has memorialized state-enacted atrocities and mass murder. The traditional monument evades memory through its clear symbolism and lack of ambiguity, thereby doing the memory work for the viewer. The monument, then, becomes a figment of the past and immediately falls outside of our frame of perception. The counter-monument, on the other hand, is concerned with the ongoing hold the past has on shaping our present. In relation to the long ‘Sisyphean’ debates about how best to commemorate loss of millions of Jewish lives during the Shoah, Young writes, ‘[T]he surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution’.[8] That is, resistance to a fixed notion of memory creates new spaces of memorialization. The counter-archivist, then, is highly conscious of the challenges they are posing to our ways of knowing and of enshrining certain histories. Departing from the traditional archive’s false claims to objectivity (that conceal its own self-interests in narratives of power), the counter-archive is self-aware of its inability to objectively capture said events. Consequently, the counter-archive engages the viewer by fostering dialogue. In a similar fashion to Young’s counter-monument, the counter-archive implores the viewer to engage in memory work through investment in its own ambiguity and rejection of totalizing narratives. It denies simple resolutions and plain conclusions. Its aim is not to provide answers, but rather to raise questions about how archives have been wielded as tools of selective remembrance and violent oppression. Writing about the counter-monument of the Harburg Monument against Fascism —which invites the public to violate the monument by writing on it their own names and committing to stand against fascism—Young elucidates: [I]ts aim is not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by its passerby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desecration; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet.[9] Counter-archives question the validity of the traditional archive and its omniscient power. They propose that it is not just what we remember that is significant, but equally how we go about remembering. Young argues that the traditional monument impedes memory precisely because the clarity and authority of the memorial does the work for the viewer, thereby absolving the public of their own responsibility to remember. They foster a view of history that is unambiguous and therefore not a site for negotiation or contestation. The traditional memorial, much like the traditional archive, promotes engagement within a rigid, normative structure. It rejects ambiguity, precisely because nuance inhibits its own project. Thus, the archive constructs narratives that adhere to and are vested in narratives of power. Seeing that the counter-archive is concerned not solely with memory, but also with the act of remembering, questions of form are inseparable from the project of remembrance. Indeed, art facilitates questions about the relation between aesthetics and ethics. I will address, in this case, how the language of history and the language of art interact. The task of many contemporary artists is to challenge rather than to affirm cultural rules. Zoe Leonard, Cheryl Dunye, Wu Tsang, and fierce pussy, then, all produce counter-archives by throwing into stark relief the forms and practices of the archive. These artists open up new possibilities for thinking through our queer past, present, and future through their artwork. When art functions as an archival object, moreover, it suggests that artifacts collected and preserved in archives are not innocent but are, rather, charged objects. These artists all blur the boundaries between the artistic and the archival, history and imagination, and fabrication and fact. Although critical fabulation necessitates invention within a narrative, we must be wary of covering up and erasing loss. When playing with the tools of the archive, one must be acutely aware of the risk of replicating its structures of power. The paradox of critical fabulation, then, is that of writing a narrative, while simultaneously indicating loss and silence. Hartman writes, ‘Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method’.[10] In this case, leaving space for loss reminds the viewer that critical fabulation cannot offer closure to the dead and to those who suffered in the past. A refusal to romanticise a violent history of oppression is also imperative. Although the project of critical fabulation is based on individual and community healing—‘Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive’— absence is a reminder that this project cannot fundamentally undo an extensive history of violence and oppression.[11] Hartman’s refusal to expound how to give voice to a profound silence suggests that there is no singular, or prescriptive way, to treat such contradictions. Indeed, the authority on how to write history and loss is central to the archive’s own consolidation of power. Consequently, critical fabulation requires the nuance and ambiguity that the traditional archive refutes in its claim to objectivity. The necessity of maintaining loss as loss, nonetheless, does not undo the reparative nature of this project. The paradox of reflecting a marginalised community back to itself, whilst presenting an abyss, fosters a complex and interesting interaction between the viewer and the artwork. Counter-archives, thus, resist being relegated to the past because they actively engage with and challenge our present. Contemporary artists who create a counter-archive disrupt our conventional relationship to the archive because they force critical engagement, and radically oppose passive acceptance. In promoting a non-linear view of history, counter-archives mimic the traumatic structure that resists a progressive and linear process of healing. Art in the public sphere encourages a stumbling upon it that simulates the experience of flashbacks and of shock that resists stability of meaning. Hence, counter-archives assert the ceaseless irresolution of our own engagement with memory. In doing so, they reckon with the ongoing hold that the archive has on our lived present. Ann Cvetkovich’s text, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , explores the way that archives of trauma often resemble 2SLGBTQ+ archives. Both archives similarly rely on ephemerality and memory, which in their very transience and unreliability, challenge the concept of the archive: Trauma challenges common understandings of what constitutes an archive. Because trauma can be unspeakable and unrepresentable and because it is marked by forgetting and dissociation, it often leaves behind no records at all. Trauma puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into being collective witnesses and publics. It thus demands an unusual archive, whose materials, in pointing to trauma’s ephemerality, are themselves frequently ephemeral.[12] Cvetkovich notes that sites of grief and trauma are radical spaces, and she questions how we might begin to inhabit these spaces and reclaim agency through them. She begins by arguing for a wider view of trauma, one that moves beyond the extreme and those who experience trauma directly, and towards trauma’s seemingly mundane reverberations and those on the border of trauma. fierce pussy—as lesbians on the edge of the AIDS crisis—encapsulate the experience of trauma through their positioning as both insiders and outsiders. Consequently, I will question how creative responses to trauma help us to grapple with immense pain. To reiterate, Cvetkovich points to the affective power of a 2SLGBTQ+ archive. She illustrates how queer archives position themselves in opposition to the traditional archive because they do not solely document and yield knowledge but, equally and as importantly, feeling. Cvetkovich writes, ‘Gay and lesbian archives address the traumatic loss of history that has accompanied sexual life and the formation of sexual publics, and they assert the role of memory and affect in compensating for institutional neglect’.[13] In this case, personal testimony is vital to the production of a queer counter-archive, precisely because it recentres feelings of love and loss that are integral to the queer experience. Thus, an emphasis on feelings and affects provides the grounds for fostering a queer public memory. The Feigned Archive: Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive Leonard and Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive is a record of Black lesbian absence from the archive. Dunye felt disillusioned with the missing presence of Black lesbians in the archive and Watermelon Woman chronicles her search for evidence of Fae Richards: the fictional persona that she created to fill this lack. Leonard staged archival material to create evidence of Richards’s life for Dunye’s film, thereby blurring the distinction between fact and fiction (a dichotomy that the dominant archive is heavily invested in). In the film, Dunye searches for evidence of Richards in the Centre for Lesbian Information and Technology (CLIT), a fictive archive based upon the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. The ordering processes of the archive, then, construct narratives and shape the way we make knowledge claims. In opposition to the dominant archive, however, a queer counter archive insists on different ordering processes. In dialogue with Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Imaginary Archives: A Dialogue’, Dunye discusses The Fae Richards Photo Archive and Watermelon Woman . She states, ‘the queerest things about archives are their silences—their telling blanks and perversely wilful holes’.[14] These ‘holes’, gaps, and silences that Dunye articulates resonate with Hartman. Hartman, in this case, questions how we can bring these impossible stories to the surface. Impossible in the sense that, as much as we might long for such histories, we can never know them. Giovanna Zapperi’s essay, ‘woman’s reappearance: rethinking the archive in contemporary art—feminist perspectives’, explores feminist reworkings of the past through contemporary art. Zapperi expresses the impossibility of Fae Richards: ‘Fae Richards can only exist thanks to a present-lesbian gaze that is looking at her through the lenses of the liberation movements’.[15] That is, Richards—as a figure documented in the archive—can only exist because activism and political change allowed Dunye, as a lesbian and as an African-American, to be in a position where she could articulate a life for Richards. Hence, the film creates a Black lesbian counter-archive in two ways: in its documentation of Richards, and in its reputation as the first feature film to be directed by a Black lesbian. The importance of bringing Richards to life, however, cannot be understated. Richards acts as a stand-in for Black lesbians whose stories we can never know. The overlapping of Richards’s and Dunye’s archive, likewise, is acted out in the photographs themselves. As Dunye’s own friends, lovers, and community pose in the photographs, they seem to occupy an atemporal zone. Bryan-Wilson states, ‘The fictional patina they had in relation to the film has been overlaid with a different, lived history—[Dunye’s]’.[16] The past and present blend, thwarting the dominant archive’s claims to linearity. The counter-archive’s interactions with memory, history, and the archive, then, resist the distinct dichotomization of history from the present. Similarly, it blurs the line between fact and fiction. Despite the fact that the community depicted in the photographs might not necessarily have existed at that precise date, it nevertheless existed as a vibrant queer community. In several of Leonard’s photos, we see depictions of the importance of queer community—alluding to the role the counter-archive’s play in constructing queer public culture. In one, a group of five women sit around a table, drinking alcohol, and smiling at the camera. Fae sits on the left-hand side, perched on the lap of her lover and director, Martha Page. She leans in, smiling as her right hand rests on the side of the table, holding a cigarette. The three women to the right of Martha are unidentified, but a scribble in blue ink along the bottom of the image reads, ‘Me and the girls at the ‘Hotspot’. The women in the photo are unabashedly identified as queer women based on coded signifiers that are recognizable to other queer women: men’s clothing, short haircuts, and the way they occupy space in a forward and comfortable way that counteracts the male gaze. Furthermore, Leonard’s use of photography as a medium allows her to critically fabulate the past. Zapperi writes, ‘Leonard has been interested in the photographic image’s implication in the production of sexual difference, as well as in the way in which photography is concerned with the passing of time’.[17] Photography is entangled with history and imprecise memory. Like the archive, photography often lays false claims to objectivity and seeks to distance the photographer from their subject. Nevertheless, what is made visible—through the lens—and how we interpret images reflect systems of knowledge and power. Acts of seeing are products of tensions between external images and internal thought processes. How we see, then, is socially constructed. Leonard, thus, exposes the medium of photography as something that can be tacitly manipulated in order to convey particular narratives. She simulates a variety of photographic genres (photo booth, family snapshot, film still, press photograph, portrait) in order to appropriate and subvert the methods of the traditional archive and draw attention to its own methods of deceit. Photographs, by virtue of their nature, signify that their subject is important, and Leonard, in this case, asserts the importance of lesbian lives and intimate queer feelings. They also ‘conjure up vulnerability, disappearance, and melancholia. The images are often damaged, cut or stained, reinforcing their meaning as witnesses of past events’.[18] The wear and tear on the surface of the photographs is perhaps one of their most deceptive elements—their feigned age evokes a nostalgic and affective response from the viewer who is convinced that Fae Richards in fact lived. Nevertheless, The Fae Richards Photo Archive nods to its own artifice. Although Leonard and Dunye play with the viewer’s conceptions of fact and fiction by drawing us into the fictionality of Fae Richards as if it might be real, they often subtly gesture to their work as being fabricated. Constructing Richards as an actress allows Leonard to play around with photos of sets and cameras, alluding to processes that she is similarly engaging in and drawing attention to her own situatedness as a photographer. In one photograph, Martha stands with her hands on her hips before a camera. The caption reads, ‘Martha Page at Newark Studios. Photographed for the story ‘The Girl Director of ‘Jersey Girl’’ in The Philadelphia Inquirer. October, 1931’.[19] The studio light on the right hand side of the photograph illuminates the image on a diagonal axis. Martha’s face and upper torso are clearly visible, while the lower half of the photo slips into obscurity. In the darkness, we can make out the silhouette of a seated figure behind Martha. Their face appears to be covered by a dark piece of fabric, alluding, perhaps, to the individuals whose presences are purposefully obfuscated from the archive. The explicit presence of harsh studio lighting in the photograph, then, draws the viewer’s attention to the way that technology is manipulated to control how and what we see. Moreover, the lighting works to cast shadows, creating a doubling of figures and objects in the scene: Martha’s shadow and that of the camera are cast onto the brick wall. Indeed, this doubling produces a metapicture.[20] Leonard creates a picture within a picture by drawing our attention to the fallibility of photography. She hints to the photographic process to make the viewer acutely aware of their own participation in the image through the act of seeing. As viewers, we are positioned behind the apparatus, which externalises the artistic standpoint. Put in the place of the photographer, the viewer is forced to consider the decisions that went into producing this image. The meta picture is self-referential: thinking about its own status as a picture, calling attention to its status as ‘art’, and referring to its own artifice. Leonard is thinking about the tradition of photography—particularly in its intimate relation with the archive—and her own relation to it. Her consciousness of the medium, therefore, necessarily subverts claims to objectivity. The book itself is constructed in the modus operandi of the archive. Dunye and Leonard draw us into the artifice, only to let up their simulation at the end of the book to subvert the fallibility of the dominant archive. The end of the book includes a list of cast and crew, drawing attention to the project’s deception. It is also in this list that we learn that Dunye herself appears in an image as ‘Black Dyke on Roof #2’. The use of derogatory language in the cast list alerts us to the tendency of the dominant archive to weaponize such terms against queer people. Leonard and Dunye, then, reclaim this language in the same way that they reclaim the archive: drawing parallels between the way derogatory language and the archive are similarly wielded as tools of violence and oppression. Moreover, Dunye’s presence creates a slippage between past and present that leads the viewer to question the readiness with which they often accept the claims of the dominant archive. Speaking to Bryan-Wilson, Dunye tells us that the feigned archive is ‘a mixture of the truth and fictions in [her] life and how they coexist’.[21] The Fae Richards Photo Archive , thus, challenges our received ideas about temporality, truth, memory, and the purpose of the archive. This project is facilitated by desire and Zapperi writes, ‘Desire here is what mediates the relationship between past, present, and future, positioning the artist’s subjective voice in the process of constructing alternative forms of knowledge’.[22] Thus, layers of queer desire overlap in the relationships portrayed in the photographs themselves, and in the ever-present queer desire to unearth a lost history. ‘[T]he site of this performance…is not necessarily a safe space for all the communities referenced in this work’: Queer Memory and the Museum Space in Wu Tsang’s Green Room Tsang’s 2012 installation, Green Room , creates a queer counter-archive by using critical fabulation to reproduce queer safe spaces within the museum—a historically unsafe space for the 2SLGBTQ+ community, because of its erasure and misrepresentation of queer identities. Unlike Leonard and Dunye, who produce a counter-archive of desire and intimacy, Tsang is interested in queer public culture. Her work plays with the binary of public and private spheres in order to call attention to how gender and sexuality operate within this dichotomy. At the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Tsang exhibited two pieces: Green Room , and a feature-length film, Wildness , that both centre around the gay bar Silver Platter. Tsang, therefore, archives queer community building practices. She problematizes the paradox of the public/private binary by revealing how queer safe spaces often straddle and deconstruct this binary. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s essay, ‘Public and Private: Spheres of Influence’, questions how the binary of public and private is used to preserve heteronormativity and suppress queer identity. He argues that the interests of the public sphere are defended through the regulation of the private: ‘[T]he bed is a site where we are not only born, where we die, where we make love, but it is also a place where the state has a pressing interest, a public interest’.[23] The separation of private and public life is therefore a delusion as it applies to marginalised communities. Gonzalez-Torres uses statistical evidence to support his argument that certain private spaces are more public than others—that is, more subject to state control. He writes, ‘There is no private sphere in the modern state. We can only speak about private property. There is no private space, no private entity. At least not for certain groups when it is still legal and endorsed by the state to oppress and discriminate because of who we love in private and, yes, outdoors too’.[24] That is, both the public and private spheres have always been contentious for the 2SLGBTQ+ community. Queer private spaces are often highly regulated by state control, while the public sphere has always posed threats of both violence and erasure to queer people. Tsang’s Green Room , to reiterate, operates as both a dressing room for Biennial performers and as an art piece, open to museum visitors when not in use as a dressing room. Tsang, then, creates an installation that places itself, simultaneously, within both the public and private sphere, thereby collapsing distinctions between the two. Tsang subverts the assumption that art is inherently decorative by building a space that is both artwork, and functional (ie intended to support art). The space held custom designed furniture, mirrors, and carpet, inspired by the Silver Platter, but equally had to be designed to meet the architectural needs of the dressing room space: such as mirrors with vanity lighting, desks, chairs, and clothing racks. As Green Room demands, and indeed was built for interaction, it gradually accumulates the battering of use and unsettles conceptions of art as being untouchable. Installations often disrupt the traditional museum-going experience by being both experiential and, frequently, ephemeral. Ephemerality—as it has been previously discussed in relation to Cvetkovich’s theoretical work—is an oddity in the archive. If the archive relies on permanence, the volatility of ephemera throws archival practices into disarray. As Cvetkovich writes, ‘The stock-in-trade of the gay and lesbian archive is ephemera’, because they produce ‘the unusual emotional archive necessary to record the often traumatic history of gay and lesbian culture’.[25] Tsang’s work, as an installation, is temporary, which throws into question its capacity to act as an archive. Nevertheless, she plays with these ideas of impermanence and wear in Green Room in order to reference the mutability of queer culture. The wear and tear of the space itself creates a physical archive of utility. As Green Room fluctuates between a functional lounge area and an art installation—which equally, and in their own right, demand engagement and use—it forces the viewer to be conscious of the way in which they occupy the space. Like Young’s counter-monument, Tsang’s counter-archive demands viewer participation. Memory work, that is, demands active engagement and labour on the part of the viewer, which is why I call it memory work . Tsang deconstructs the practices of the archive by allowing, and encouraging, the violation of her installation. Wear and tear make known the history of the space, thereby drawing attention to the history of the museum space as a whole, and its record of violence, erasure, and oppression—a history that parallels, and often intersects with, that of the archive. Moreover, Tsang’s nod to gay bars, and spaces of camaraderie (the green room) in her work highlights queer safe spaces that are, and have been historically, vital to the 2SLGBTQ+ community. These spaces provide the ground on which community can be built—returning to Blake’s point that queer people do not have access to this in the home/private sphere—by providing a space where those who are forced to hide their identity (often, for their own safety) are able to comfortably inhabit their queerness. By inviting the public into a semi-closed space, Tsang highlights the potential danger posed by the infiltration of cisgendered heterosexual people into queer spaces.[26] Tsang questions the ingrained comfort that cis-het people often exhibit in 2SLGBTQ+ spaces without realizing that their presence is often threatening to the community whom that space was built for. Tsang therefore insists on centring queer voices. In Green Room , Tsang screens Que Paso Con Los Martes? This two-channel video focuses on the Los Angeles queer community and is specifically centred on the experience of a trans woman who fled persecution in Honduras, finding a vibrant queer community at the Silver Platter. Tsang prioritizes her voice in the space and insists that gay bars provide a haven for queer people from the persecution they face in the external world. Her voice echoes through the room; viewer participation, in this case, hinges on the act of listening to and learning from queer testimony. Tsang thereby questions what voices get to be heard, both in terms of how the archive actively erases and neglects queer voices, as well as in relation to the voice as being culturally and politically constituted.[27] Rita Gonzalez’s essay, ‘Speech Acts’ explores how Tsang uses voice in her work in order to disrupt normative notions of gender and sexuality. Tsang is interested in the voice as a culturally and politically conditioned entity. She describes her own artistic practice as invested in exploring the voice as a tool for subverting cisnormativity and rebuking ‘normative readings of a feminine or masculine voice, with consideration to the sensitivity around voice and ‘passing’ in trans communities. Voice can seem to exceed the body, and modes of recording and playback in music and filmic sound can be used to break down normative readings of gender and sexuality’.[28] That is, Tsang’s use of testimony (and therefore voice) in her work necessarily questions notions of authenticity and the ways in which gender presentation and embodiment are highly regulated into pre-existing cis-normative and binary structures. Gonzalez writes, ‘the voice can be used to disturb and contest, but also serves to conform and restrict identity’.[29] Accordingly, in Green Room , Tsang is not only thinking about the voice as isolated, but rather as highly culturally and environmentally situated. Crafting a three-dimensional environment, while simultaneously screening a two-channel documentary film, allows Tsang to create a fully immersive experience. She states: ‘My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings’.[30] The installation creates a conversation through its various aspects and shifting purposes. The video reflects back on itself through the dressing room mirror, creating the unsettling effect of doubling that which is already doubled through the presence of multiple display devices. Moreover, the film itself shifts between interviews and atmospheric shots of the Silver Platter. Tsang foregrounds the relationship between voice and environment, suggesting that certain environments are more conducive to certain voices being heard. While the dominant archive silences queer voices, Tsang suggests that queer bars might produce their own counter-archive of queer experience. Furthermore, being brought into the installation implicates the viewer. Tsang’s reconstructed physical space of the Silver Platter evokes the highly political history of gay bars. Gay bars have always had strong ties to political activism and in 1969, the gay liberation movement began in retaliation against the police raids of Stonewall Inn in New York City. The viewer necessarily becomes enmeshed in this history upon entering Green Room . In 2011, Tsang made a blog post in advance of her performance of full body quotation at a New Museum Fundraiser. She reflects on the history of queer voices in the museum space; ideas that she continues to develop through her work in Green Room . I would like to end this section with Tsang’s statement, because it contextualises acts of seeing in Green Room . Tsang forces the viewer to reflect on the social, political, and cultural situatedness of their own gaze and how it affects their engagement with the piece. Tsang considers the place of queer performers in the museum environment, particularly at exclusive events: ‘the role that performance artists often play in [museum fundraisers], as being complicit ‘entertainment’ jesters for elite patronage of museums’.[31] She considers how best to engage with such a complex issue: not performing, and risking further distancing queer people from museum spaces, or, perform and exposing herself and her larger community to further harm. Tsang, thus, drafts a statement to contextualise her work and force her audience to think critically about the way that they, and museum spaces as a whole, continue to perpetuate violence against the 2SLGBTQ+ community: Tonight’s performance features all misappropriated material. We are channelling voices of people involved in the making of the film Paris is Burning twenty years ago. Originally I wanted to keep this source secret because I didn’t want you to take these voices for granted as being ‘authentic’. But the site of this performance (i.e. a party at the New Museum, Performa, downtown Manhattan, etc.) is not necessarily a safe space for all the communities referenced in this work. If you wanna witness this; please first recognize that we exist. In order to fall apart as complex beings, we need first to be able to live.[32] Tsang prompts viewers to consider the way in which they carry forward such a violent history. She relies on behavioural conventions and norms that are at play in the museum space: that people be respectful of and quietly attentive to the art, for example. These conventions have historically made museums more accessible to certain groups of people: white, upper-class, and well educated. Tsang subverts these same norms by using them to encourage people to hear and listen to queer testimony, thereby building a queer counter-archive . Rage as Grief in the Work of fierce pussy fierce pussy formed at the crux of the AIDS crisis in 1991, and as such, their work is highly political and deeply concerned with the advocation of queer rights and visibility. Their work has often intersected with the archive, and they have worked in the past with the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City. In this section, I will be focusing on two of their projects: gutter (2009) and For the Record (2013), because these works best encapsulate the creation of a counter-archive through critical fabulation. fierce pussy’s site-specific work, like Tsang, is deeply informed by the public/private binary. They use public space as a tool for their own activism. Although all the artists I have discussed respectively use their art to advocate for 2SLGBTQ+ rights and visibility, fierce pussy’s message is more explicitly directed towards the cis-het outsider in response to the AIDS crisis. Cvetkovich writes, ‘The AIDS crisis offered clear evidence that some deaths were more important than others and that homophobia and, significantly, racism could affect how trauma was publicly recognized’.[33] Their work, then, is informed by this period of national trauma and mourning for the 2SLGBTQ+ community. Additionally, Cvetkovich’s work on trauma takes interest in those living in proximity to trauma, including lesbians on the edge of the AIDS crisis. She is interested in the roles lesbians played ‘as caretakers and activists’ and how this legacy is pervaded by ‘the privilege of moving on because they have remained alive’.[34] fierce pussy’s own work, in this case, must be analysed through the spectre of death from which they arose. Cvetkovich traces the queer archival impulse to the reckoning with death and mortality in the wake of the AIDS crisis: ‘This encounter [with mortality] produces the archival impulse, the desire to collect objects not just to protect against death but in order to create practices of mourning’.[35] Death thus provides the impetus for recording one’s history. In the reverberations of loss, the desire to record a social and cultural history strengthens. All the artists I have discussed, in this sense, are grappling with profound loss; be it death or archival absence, they similarly signify the pressing need to create a queer counter-archive. Nevertheless, the AIDS crisis made apparent that this project is not solely concerned with documentation, but rather, and perhaps more pressingly, activism. Queer artists create a counter-archive precisely because the dominant archive lacks the means to capture the grief, trauma, and oppression that it inflicts: ‘We knew deep down that we had to create our own rites and rituals if we were to truly honour and acknowledge our grief’.[36] This search for new modes of mourning is consistent with a counter-archival project, which seeks to create news processes of remembering that arise out of an effaced history. Although fierce pussy’s work is permeated by feelings and affects generated by the AIDS crisis, For the Record explicitly confronts the profound loss caused by the epidemic (and the government’s failure to adequately respond). Produced in 2013, it is the more recent of the two projects that I will be touching on, but I want to begin here because of its direct link to the AIDS crisis. The project was centred around an exhibition at Printed Matter, but also featured a series of posters, stickers, postcards, and downloadable broadsides.[37] fierce pussy’s work relies on text, often using succinct, clear, and resonating language to convey their message. These tactics resemble practices traditionally associated with advertising, which is also consistent with their use of spaces designated for advertising (e.g. windows, alleys, and billboards, etc.). In For the Record , they repeat the tagline: ‘if [he/she/they] were alive today’. fierce pussy’s use of language, therefore, creates a counter-archive of loss, even as they refuse to name victims. While the refusal to name might first appear as a depersonalization of the trauma, I argue that it accentuates the widespread nature of the crisis. The loss of lives, then, is equally the loss of records, names, and a culture. The generalising language, moreover, is undercut by the following statements; often intimate, they implicate the viewer. Phrases such as: ‘you’d be texting her right now’, ‘you’d be so her type’, ‘he would have you on your knees’, ‘you’d still be arguing about that’, and ‘he’d have his arm around you’ suggest familiar, unremarkable actions (texting, dating, sex, fights, touch). Nevertheless, along with the repetition of ‘you’, the statements suggest attachment. The viewer, then, feels the loss as if it was their own loved one and is forced to reckon with their own relation to the crisis. To return to Hartman, although the act of critical fabulation cannot possibly liberate the dead, its resonances are felt in the living that are finally given the opportunity to heal. For the Record mourns friends, families, lovers, artists, and activists through the language of lives cut short. The declarations imagine a possible present that the ‘if’ reminds us is impossible. The font is printed in a black, sans-serif typeface, apart from the word ‘AIDS’, which is printed in red. The posters state, ‘if he were alive today he’d still be living with AIDS’. The emphasised ‘AIDS’ suggests the incoherency of living with a disease, so long considered a death sentence. Moreover, it serves to make AIDS, which is often invisible, visible. The lack of punctuation, moreover, implies a kind of urgency—that of a crisis improperly handled by the state, because of whose lives were being lost. fierce pussy, thus, draws attention not only to the act of dying of AIDS, but also to the ongoing struggle for those living with the disease in the present. fierce pussy’s work is suffused with rage and militancy as a response to trauma and frustration. Cvetkovich draws on Douglas Crimp, finding that trauma often elicits ‘militancy as an emotional response and a possible mode of containment of irremediable psychic distress’.[38] Anger, in this case, saturates queer mourning rites in response to the AIDS crisis. The state’s response to the AIDS crisis was informed by homophobia and racism; because marginalised communities were disproportionately affected by AIDS, the state felt no urgency to respond. The discourse surrounding the crisis, then, centred around bigotry. fierce pussy’s public advocacy for queer rights asserts that visibility and perception matter. In an interview, they iterate their interest in public space, stating, ‘We don’t see public space as neutral or abstract’.[39] Similar to Gonzalez-Torres, fierce pussy is thinking about public space as paradoxical for the 2SLGBTQ+ community: ‘Historically, public space has held a contradiction for queer people; on the one hand we have been invisible and on the other hand we are frequently the target of violence in public’.[40] They respond to this contradiction through their art, that inserts queer narratives into the public sphere. Gutter , like For the Record , relies on language and storytelling. By rewriting and editing lesbian pulp fiction novels from the 1940s through 70s, fierce pussy gives lesbians a chance at a happy ending. Gutter arose out of fierce pussy’s residency at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and was originally shown in 2009, at the exhibition ‘Tainted Love’ at La Mama Galleria. In the adjoining alleyway, Extra Place, they hung their posters along the brick wall to create a public mural. The novels, not necessarily written by lesbians, are consistent with mainstream media’s tendency to ‘leave lesbians sad, lonely, or dead’.[41] Cvetkovich argues that these representations have ‘become part of the archive of lesbian culture’.[42] The literary trope, ‘Bury your Gays’ (also called ‘Dead Lesbian Syndrome’), emerged as a way to write 2SLGBTQ+ characters, without breaking decency laws that forbade the promotion of ‘perverse acts’.[43] ‘Bury your Gays’ alludes to the tendency to kill off queer characters as punishment for their homosexuality and/or gender deviance, presenting such traits as inherently immoral and undesirable.[44] fierce pussy mines the archive of lesbian pulp novels, tainted with moral deprivation, condemnation, and misery. They redact and edit texts to reveal a counter-archive of language, one where lesbians are allowed to experience pleasure. fierce pussy states, ‘From the position of the reader we become the writer; by crossing-out and underlining we re-edit these stories to more accurately reflect our experience and desire. In our version, women can have hot sex and ‘happy endings’—in both senses of the word’.[45] I want to pause my analysis of gutter to problematize ‘happiness’ and ‘happy endings’. To embark on an analysis of queer happiness, we must explore what the term implies outside of a heteronormative structure. Sarah Ahmed’s ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness’, problematizes who is allowed to be happy. Ahmed uses the example of one’s wedding day, often described in advance as the ‘happiest day of your life’. That is, happiness promises itself as a reward for following a set path, one that is inherently cisgendered and heterosexual. Ahmed writes, ‘Affect aliens, those of us who are alienated by happiness, are creative: not only do we want the wrong things, not only do we embrace possibilities that we are asked to give up, but we can create lifeworlds around these wants’.[46] fierce pussy, then, subverts the expectations tied to happiness that often deny it to queer people. They suggest that happiness, like the language that they manipulate, is malleable and holds a multiplicity of meanings. In writing out negative emotions, they do not negate or dispel negative affects, but rather present lesbians with the possibility of happiness in a way that deviates from heteronormative standards. In opposition to the happy endings it presents, gutter is saturated with rage. The blacked-out text implies frustration and anger. fierce pussy states, ‘The way history is written often denies our existence. We go back into these texts to reinsert the lesbian experience: our anger , our desire, our impact, our lives’.[47] Hence, they disrupt the erasure of queer voices in the archive through their own erasure of text. Like Tsang, fierce pussy is concerned with whose voices get to be heard. They question notions of authorship by upturning the process of reading into one of writing. Reading, then, rather than being prescriptive, becomes innovative. In gutter , texts that have historically worked to suppress queer identity, become liberatory as they open up spaces of exploring queer desire. Furthermore, the act of opening up new spaces is mirrored through fierce pussy’s use of the public sphere. They locate queer sex acts—’Drop your skirt. Now step out of it’—in the public sphere, thereby questioning the erasure of queer identity from public space. 2SLGBTQ+ people are often either required to suppress their own queerness in public settings, or on the other hand, it is actively erased through normative presumptions of sexuality. fierce pussy takes private acts and transforms them into a public, shared experience. About their own work, they write, ‘It is often through the act of reading that young people first find possible reflections of their identity. From the first time one looks up the word ‘lesbian’ in the dictionary, the pages of books provide a safe and secret space to explore one’s fantasies, desire and identity’.[48] In gutter , they move this hidden act into view by building a queer counter-archive for future generations of lesbians, who will hopefully not have to live in such a hetero-saturated world. fierce pussy makes space for queer visibility, which they define in opposition to gay visibility: ‘Today, ‘gay visibility’, which is more about assimilation and gay marriage, has replaced queer visibility and a vision of radical social change’.[49] This vision that fierce pussy articulates in their work is akin to the counter-archival project that denounces normative archival practices in order to make new spaces for queer identity. Fostering a queer public memory is more important than being palatable to the dominant culture. Conclusion The artists discussed in this essay delineate a counter-archive through their use of critical fabulation to ‘recover’ an unrecoverable past. They question the imbued authority of the archive to give voice to certain histories, and inevitably, to silence others: ‘The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb’.[50] The archive, therefore, is problematic for 2SLGBTQ+ people who find ourselves actively erased and persecuted in dominant discourse. Leonard, Dunye, Tsang, and fierce pussy create new narratives of queer memory through contemporary art. In doing so, they fabricate an atemporal zone in which queer voices can be heard. Their art is situated outside and between the past, present, and future of queer identities. From a space of trauma, they use their art to reclaim agency and unveil power relations in the archive. Leonard and Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive fabricates the archive of Fae Richards to produce unstable images that are as much tied up with our present as they are with the past. By bringing to bear the methods of the archive, they expose its very precarity and artifice. They give life to Fae Richards in the present—as a stand-in for the many Black lesbians that have been denied a presence in the archive—and yet disclose her fictionality to indicate loss and reveal the impossibility of redeeming the lives of the dead. In Tsang’s Green Room , she creates a fabricated setting rather than a fabricated persona. Tsang displaces the politics of the gay bar into the museum space, in order to reveal the intimate ties between 2SLGBTQ+ oppression and artistic representation. She centres queer testimony in order to question associations between voice and authenticity. Displacement, then, also exposes certain environments as houses of power, namely the museum and the archive. Tsang’s interest in the public/private binary and how it has been historically contentious for queer people is also a factor in fierce pussy’s work. They exhibit site-specific work to implicate cis-het outsiders in queer trauma. By moving private queer experiences into the public sphere, fierce pussy creates new spaces for queer visibility. Like Tsang, they problematize the paradox between safe and unsafe spaces. Safe spaces, that is, are always under attack and risk infiltration and gentrification if they belong to a marginalised group. In this case, there is no way to guarantee safety without radical social change. These artists play with memory in order to create stories that trouble received ideas of truth and objectivity that are rooted in the archive. Artistic practices allow the past to be written anew by virtue of the conditions in which we now find ourselves, in the wake of the queer liberation movements of the late twentieth-century. Creativity and imagination are thus necessary in the production of a counter-archive. Leonard, Dunye, Tsang, and fierce pussy respectively produce counter-archives of queer genealogy. Critical fabulation is a restorative practice for the living, providing the means for individual and collective healing. Through the act of fabricating new narratives, we are able to facilitate new ways of mourning lost memories. Sophia Dime Sophia Dime (they/them/she/her) holds an Honours BA in Contemporary Studies and English with a certificate in Art History from the University of King’s College in Halifax. Sophia has held positions at Esther Schipper Gallery in Berlin, Eyelevel Artist Run Centre in Halifax, and the Magenta Foundation in Toronto. This upcoming fall, they will begin their MA in Art History at Columbia University in New York. [1] Cheryl Dunye and Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (Artspace Books 1996). [2] Throughout this paper, I will use queer and 2SLGBTQ+ interchangeably. Although ‘queer’ is quite widely accepted as an umbrella term for the community (because it encompasses both gender and sexuality, as well as a deviation from heteronormative structure), it is important that we recognize the historical and ongoing harm that the term continues to cause. Many members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community are uncomfortable with the term because it has been historically weaponized against 2SLGBTQ+ people. It is important to be aware of how the reclamation of language is often highly contested and continues to be harmful. [3] Zoe Leonard is also a founding core member of fierce pussy. [4] To situate my own perspective, I want to call attention to my identity as a white, Jewish, non-binary lesbian. Throughout this paper, I will refer to the 2SLGBTQ+ community in relational language. [5] Nayland Blake, ‘Curating in a Different Light’ in David J Getsy (ed), Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2016) 120. [6] Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ (1995) 25(2) Diacritics 9. [7] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language (Pantheon Books 1972) 129. [8] James E Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’ (1992) 18(2) Critical Inquiry 270. [9] ibid 277. [10] Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008) 12(2) Small Axe 12. [11] ibid 4. [12] Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Duke University Press 2003) 7. [13] ibid 241. [14] Julia Bryan-Wilson and Cheryl Dunye, ‘Imaginary Archives: A Dialogue’ (2013) 72(2) Art Journal 83. [15] Giovanna Zapperi, ‘woman’s reappearance: rethinking the archive in contemporary art—feminist perspectives’ (2013) 105 Feminist Review 33. [16] Bryan-Wilson and Dunye (n 14) 83. [17] Zapperi (n 15) 28-9. [18] ibid 33. [19] Dunye and Leonard (n 1). [20] For more on the meta picture and the way in which art theorises about itself, see William John Thomas Mitchell, ‘Metapictures’ in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (University of Chicago Press 1994). [21] Bryan-Wilson and Dunye (n 14) 84. [22] Zapperi (n 15) 27. [23] Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘Public and Private: Spheres of Influence’ in Getsy (n 5) 90. [24] ibid. [25] Cvetkovich (n 12) 243-4. [26] I will henceforth be referring to ‘cisgendered heterosexual’ as ‘cis-het’. [27] Rita Gonzalez, ‘Speech Acts’ in Elodie Evers et al, Wu Tsang: Not In My Language (Walther König 2015) 23. [28] ibid 26. [29] ibid 23. [30] ibid 25. [31] Wu Tsang, ‘in order to fall apart as human beings, we need first to be able to live’ in Getsy (n 5) 211. [32] ibid 212. [33] Cvetkovich (n 12) 6. [34] ibid 160. [35] ibid 269. [36] ibid 266. [37] fierce pussy, ‘projects’ < https://fiercepussy.org/projects > accessed 10 March 2022. [38] Cvetkovich (n 12) 162-3. [39] fierce pussy, ‘Interview’ in Getsy (n 5) 223. [40] ibid 223. [41] Cvetkovich (n 12) 253. [42] ibid 253. [43] Hailey Hulan, ‘Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, Context’ (2017) 21(1) McNair Scholars Journal 18. [44] In contemporary media, queer characters are still killed off at inordinate rates. Cf. ibid. [45] fierce pussy (n 39) 223. [46] Sara Ahmed, ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness’ (2010) 35(3) Signs 593. [47] fierce pussy (n 39) 224. Emphasis added. [48] ibid 223. [49] ibid 224. [50] Hartman (n 10) 2.

Lesia's poem No Place Like Home explores the shared human longing for a home, not only as a search for a refuge or place to settle, or a return to where one is from, but also as a feeling of belonging and rootedness. Lesia Daria Lesia Daria is a writer, journalist, campaigner, and volunteer. She is a communications adviser at the Ukrainian Institute London, and in Surrey where she is active in her local community, she is helping Ukrainian refugees to settle into life in the UK. Previously Lesia worked as a journalist in Washington DC, Kyiv, London, and New York, and lived in Paris, Minsk, and Istanbul. She holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In Lesia’s three-in-one poem A Fictional War , two voices speak in separated monologues but are also integrated and juxtaposed. The poem confronts the battle of narratives (lived, reported experience versus Russian lies) that rage alongside and form a critical part of the war and brutal violence in Ukraine. Lesia Daria Lesia Daria is a writer, journalist, campaigner, and volunteer. She is a communications adviser at the Ukrainian Institute London, and in Surrey where she is active in her local community, she is helping Ukrainian refugees to settle into life in the UK. Previously Lesia worked as a journalist in Washington DC, Kyiv, London, and New York, and lived in Paris, Minsk, and Istanbul. She holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

As of this writing, an Alabama law that would have made it a felony in the state to provide a teenager with gender-affirming healthcare, punishable by up to ten years in prison, is held up in the courts.[1] If it were allowed to go into effect, it would mean that even in consultation with medical professionals, operating on globally-accepted standards of care for transgender youth, a 17-year-old transgender girl cannot get access to puberty blockers or hormonal replacement therapy. Missouri lawmakers intend to extend this ban even to adults , banning care up until the age of 25. Meanwhile, Florida’s Department of Health has issued non-binding guidance that would prohibit even ‘social transition’ for youths (i.e., a child referring to themselves by new pronouns, wearing clothes associated with a different gender, but with no medical interventions) which, if it were ever enforced, would amount to the state policing children’s gender expression at an astonishing degree of invasiveness and detail.[2] But even non-binding guidance can grant authority and permission for laypeople to execute private acts of bigotry. These are merely the marquee episodes of a nationwide assault on transgender children in the US; it is a striking culmination of years of building moral panic on both sides of the Atlantic that has finally burst into full-blown authoritarianism, entirely of a piece with the renewed assault against abortion rights and other reproductive freedoms from a far-right determined to exert ever tighter control over the bodily autonomy of the many, many groups it despises.[3] The trans rights debate has become the thin end of a wedge being used by social conservatives to reverse decades of progress on a whole range of issues—from abortion, to contraception, to sexual liberation more broadly, to the rights of queer couples and families to marry, adopt, or even exist in public. At the heart of these issues are questions of bodily autonomy, gender politics, and civil liberties. They are also a front in the ongoing attack against democracy that has gripped many countries over the last two decades, from India to Turkey to Hungary to the United States. ‘Democratic backsliding’ often buries trans and gender-variant people first; the gender anxiety at the heart of fascism brings no tolerance for difference.[4] Especially anything that might hint that the sex castes of male and female—with the patriarchal hierarchy between them taken for granted—are not, in fact, immutable. That fact alone explains the otherwise strange alliance between the far-right, religious social conservatives, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, united in fear of what trans people represent to them. To them, we seem a hydra of threats: an affront to nature, to God, to the social order, a threat to women and girls. We are all things to all people except ourselves. Thus, I shall strive to be myself in these pages: a feminist scholar, first and foremost. It is worth taking a broad survey of what this assault on our human dignity has wrought, where it came from, and what the role of a renewed trans politics might be in the face of ongoing attacks against democracy itself. Along the way, I’ll even answer the most popular question of the silly season: ‘What is a woman?’. *** What had been, for years, a toy thought-experiment for many commentators in the British and American media—treating transgender people or ‘gender ideology’ as some kind of threat in an unending cavalcade of editorials, features, and online discourse—has now become a political programme.[5] Some centrist commentators who indulged in building this moral panic now appear surprised at how it has come to fruition, but it was always going to be impossible for discourse about the supposed ‘threat’ to children from the ‘transgender lobby’ to not, at some point, manifest as policy in a political climate so thoroughly despoiled by the so-called culture wars.[6] Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which bans primary school teachers from mentioning LGBT people in any positive context, has already led to the firing of queer teachers and started a nationwide slander campaign that casts all transgender people as ‘groomers’ of young children.[7] Indeed, the very act of suggesting it’s okay to be trans is now being cast as ‘grooming’ by conservatives, an incredibly incendiary allegation that is bound to lead to violence and has already led to abuse in the streets—the harassment of Saoirse Gowan, a transgender woman living in Washington D.C., on the city’s metro by a man filming her and calling her a groomer and paedophile is but one such incident.[8] Transgender people were bound to become the next distracting target in an age of overlapping crises that demand concerted action. Instead of blocking climate change, they would come for puberty blockers; instead of building resilience against the next pandemic, they seek to create an epidemic of terror among trans children; instead of addressing ever-widening inequality and poverty, they seek to create conditions that make the trans minority’s immiseration that much likelier. We make an appealing target because pointless cultural debates are able to flood the media with unresolvable controversies that make for barbed, duelling editorials, stinging vox pops, and a blizzard of screaming social media posts that drown out other, less welcome discourse. Particularly for conservative politicians, we provide a welcome distraction from any serious questions about material issues. It is very much worth noting that in a week where UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson struggled to respond to a journalist’s question about a pensioner whose skyrocketing energy bills meant she had to cut back on food and ride a public bus all day to save on her heating bill,[9] we had been treated to Johnson’s Health Secretary Sajid Javid promising to put trans women in government healthcare wards with men. While one woman literally starved herself to make ends meet, we were told imposing needless suffering on critically ill trans women was a great boon for feminism. In the UK, it has been depressing to watch newspapers put anti-trans attacks on their front pages on days with other, considerably more pressing major news stories, whether in Ukraine, about climate change, or even local elections.[10] It crowds out both the reality of trans existence and the many other urgent issues of our time in a way that, even leaving aside its animating prejudice, verges on journalistic malpractice. As a simple heuristic, one can assume any attack on trans people from a member of the political class is an attempt to avoid spending time on an issue of material substance. But we are not simply an abstract culture; we, too, are real people harmed by the climate that is being created by unending headlines questioning our very right to exist in public space. When it comes to the new laws in the US, the risk to some of our most vulnerable is immense. Families are considering whether and how to leave states where they’d built their lives, to flee somewhere their children are not literally being criminalised. Youth suicides are at risk of rising again, as they did when the state of Arkansas mooted a similar bill in 2019 that was later blocked by a federal court.[11] The litigation is ongoing.[12] Meanwhile, an already dangerous climate for trans sex workers threatens to become deadlier still. The harms of such legislation in the US are myriad and material. Texas’ own bills literally make it a crime to raise a trans child, seeking to investigate parents of trans children as ‘abusers’. Such realities make the anti-trans screeds of the British press—replete with silly tirades masquerading as thought exercises, like Rod Liddle’s infamous Times column where he announced he was ‘identifying as a young, black, trans chihuahua, and the truth can go whistle’—seem even crueller than they already are, kicking a much-maligned group while they’re down.[13] As Jules Gill-Peterson put it in her recent essay about the legislative assault on trans people in the US, these are not simply cute word games to be played by the privileged: ‘Collectively, these bills are not just attacks on what you can or can’t "say" in school. They are an existential threat to your life’.[14] Gill-Peterson’s perspective is useful to us for another reason, however. Throughout this essay I’ve listed a litany of recent attacks, recent harms, and implicitly engaged in a plea to recognise our humanity. Gill-Peterson demands we go further than simple moral appeals, however, as she draws on a tradition of trans activism dating back to the women of colour-led movements of the late 60s and early 70s: Allyship doesn’t rely on evaluating trans people as morally deserving, but rather on recognizing everyone’s right to the resources and public goods that raise our quality of life. Being an ally is about the common struggle for better living conditions. The trans politics of Black and brown women have been about mutual aid and abolition since the 1970s for a reason. They have proven to be the only people unafraid to consistently care for and love trans kids without using them as moral props. This is the foundation of an intersectional perspective that understands ‘trans issues’ as intimately connected to a broader politics of equality and justice, from equal access to public education, to the availability and affordability of healthcare, to the reproductive rights required to have and raise your own children, access to social welfare and services, to equal access to public accommodations and public space. These issues implicate all of our democratic rights, resting as they do on our shared vulnerability to their erosion. What starts with trans people will not end there. To better understand why, we need to turn to the concern-trolling question that has come to dominate recent debates about trans people’s right to exist: ‘What is a woman?’ *** From the recent nomination hearings of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in America to an Australian leaders’ debate amid the country’s general election, the seemingly simple question of ‘what is a woman?’ has been used in bad faith to antagonise or belittle trans rights, or to cast any ally of trans people as delusional. Jackson’s response was certainly effective: ‘I know I am one’, while the Australian Labor Party’s leader Anthony Albanese simply said ‘an adult female’, a bland dictionary definition that was meant to avoid the trap set by the debate moderator’s question. The question should be treated with scepticism, if not outright contempt, because it is almost always asked in bad faith and never arises except in discussions about trans people’s rights. This is partly because the category is coherent only through classic Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’, where no particular definition can meaningfully exhaust the concept—try to define a ‘game’, for instance. No single feature is common or essential to the whole. Republican politicians, when reporters turned the question around on them, stumbled; Senator Josh Hawley said he ‘didn’t know’ if a woman who’d had a hysterectomy was still a woman, for instance[15]—an answer that is either silly or chilling depending on his intent. But there is a way of answering the question honestly and accurately that also reminds us of the vast political and philosophical space offered by both the linguistic idea of family resemblances and the legal-political concept of intersectionality. Historian Susan Stryker, in an explanation of the relationship of performativity to gender, offered this summation: ‘A woman, performatively speaking, is one who says she is—and who then does what woman means’.[16] Some will find this answer circular. ‘Woman means what woman means’, is what she’s seemingly saying. But this is necessary in order for the definition to be both accurate and brief: it is meant to cover a wide range of possible gender expressions in every culture and subculture where ‘woman’ is a meaningful concept. Gender is ‘an attempt to communicate…and is accomplished by ‘doing’ something rather than ‘being’ something’.[17] In other words, gender is the sum of one’s actions, an achievement—it contains both the assertion of the identity and the enactment of a socially legible instance of that identity. When you bear in mind that there are lots of ways to be a woman, or a man, or any other gender, across numerous cultures and communities, it encompasses a wide range of possibilities—rather than the stifling stereotypes that ‘gender critical’ activists accuse transgender people of perpetuating. But that issue of ‘social legibility’ is the key here. It’s part of what makes declarations of ‘I identify as an attack helicopter’—one of approximately three jokes known to transphobes—so tedious and ridiculous. There is no collectively acknowledged and constructed social role or identity of ‘attack helicopter’, nor any meaningful attempt by the speaker to enact it. It’s little more than an empty attempt at satire. Still, it’s not simply a matter of what clothes one wears, say. It’s how you’re treated by others as well. For all the cruel debates about whether or not I should be allowed to exist, or whether my existence is some kind of parodic affrontery to all other women, patriarchy has made very few mistakes about me—from street harassment to online harassment, my experiences have much more in common with my cisgender woman friends than with my male friends. It is that shared social location, and a shared experience of abuse and oppression, that creates a site for political action; a standard around which to rally. Women are divided by many vastly different experiences, shaped by geography, social class, race, religion, culture, and more; but we can come together on some shared terrain—the familial resemblance of our common gender—to address discrimination, inequality, and oppression. Understanding womanhood with an expansive, contingent definition affords us liberatory possibilities. It’s worth remembering that in all the recent debates about whether trans people should be able to use the bathrooms of their choice, many of these arguments are recycled versions of those that justified racially segregated bathrooms in the American South, where the options were ‘Men’, ‘Women’, and ‘Colored’. Black women and other women of colour were excluded from the category of ‘woman’ when it suited the imperatives of the state. An inclusive definition of any gender category would refuse these imperial edicts, dissolving the use of such categories as weapons with which to oppress particular groups of people. An inclusive definition recognises that attacks on any minority’s right to claim membership in a gender, therefore, has stark implications for other rights as well: rights to public accommodation, to public space, to public education, to voting (particularly if voter ID laws are implemented), to be gainfully employed. Fixation on trans people’s genders makes such public participation difficult if not impossible for them. When one sees the reactionary consequences of transphobia and how it connects to other forms of oppression—the similarity to the logics of racial segregation, for instance—it becomes clearer why this position is feminist in name only. This is why the ‘gender critical’ position makes so little sense: its adherents claim to seek gender’s abolition on the grounds that it is a harmful idea, but they depend on gender for the very existence and intelligibility of their philosophy. Its arbitrary lines of identity make no sense without the thing they claim to be abolishing. Their certainty about who is and isn’t ‘really’ a man or a woman depends on the very patriarchal norms and gender stereotypes they claim to oppose. In particular, they take for granted the idea that sex is an unchanging caste that you may never leave, an idea that is profoundly patriarchal as it undergirds the stability of men as a privileged class with a birthright to that very privilege. ‘Gender critical’ means little beyond trans gender critical. Equally, ‘sex-based rights’ are meaningless as a concept except as a way of drawing segregationist lines around trans people’s access to public space. Gender equity, as it has been advanced by legislation[18], and interpreted by courts in the US,[19] actually depends on a broad understanding of gender, rather than a narrow parcelling out of rights on that basis. Indeed, the term ‘sex-based’ was historically used to classify discriminatory practises, a nod to the obvious reality that prejudice is the thing ‘based’ on one’s sex (or perceived sex) and our rights are meant to secure freedom from such discrimination.[20] Liberty from rape or sexual harassment is not a ‘sex-based right’, but something people of all genders would share in, just as the right to vote is not ‘sex based’, but a shared human right to which women were denied access. It is profoundly reactionary to think of equity legislation as granting ‘race-based rights’, say, or ‘sexuality-based rights’. Indeed, such wilful misunderstanding is at the heart of the common conservative charge that minorities seek ‘special rights’—a deliberately inflammatory allegation—when in truth they seek access to the same liberty enjoyed by all their neighbours. So too is it the case with transgender people. The entire concept of a ‘sex-based right’ only emerged in opposition to trans people’s claims to human rights, and represents an attempt at drawing a narrow and limiting definition of womanhood that has much more in common with regimes of the pre-democratic past.[21] It demands we imagine the continued existence of a women’s restroom as the limited horizon of feminist politics, an ideological surrender to the myriad horrors that confront the democratic world. To acknowledge that womanhood ‘means’ something broader, in the sense of Stryker’s definition, is to acknowledge greater political possibility that can rejoin feminist politics to the material politics of equity in all areas. As a rallying standard, it can provide a united front on issues like reproductive justice, healthcare access, and the meeting of basic needs: food, shelter, and the dignity of work, combined with ample leisure in which to enjoy its fruits. *** As the United States confronts a gathering storm on reproductive healthcare, it is very much worth concluding by drawing what should be the obvious connection between abortion rights and everything discussed hitherto: bodily autonomy. What many generations of feminists have fought for is control over our own bodies, liberty from the dictates of powerful men about what our bodies are for, or what they mean. It’s a cruel irony that a minority of people now calling themselves ‘feminists’ are insisting that the only way to define ‘woman’ is as a reproductive instrument—a perspective that is a neat fit with the far-right pro-lifers now on the march in America. Those same reactionaries also seek to erase transgender people from public life. The reasons are the same: emancipated women, cis and trans, as well as the mere existence of trans and nonbinary people, are an affront to their deeply conservative ideology of gender. We prove that alternatives to their sex castes are possible. To ban abortion and to ban contraception—as some Republican politicians are continuing to do—is to seek to control women, to chain us to biology; similar goals are at work in their anti-trans crusade, to exile queer and trans people from public life and positions of public trust, to break up our families, and criminalise us. Beyond providing reproductive care, it’s not a coincidence that many Planned Parenthood clinics are also places where trans people receive gender-affirming care, and where trans men and nonbinary people can go for sensitive treatment of their own pregnancies or uterine health. It is precisely that dignity and equality that is the target of so many right-wing extremists at this delicate moment in time. Bodily autonomy is a core capability that is at the foundation of so many other rights, all of which are under threat. These shared threats are fertile ground on which to build movements, and expand on existing ones. If hope lies anywhere, it is there, in the blessedly vast country of the meaning of ‘woman’. Katherine Cross Katherine Cross is a PhD candidate in information science at the University of Washington School of Information. She has extensively studied online harassment, social media culture, content moderation, and the ethics of big data. She is also a sought-after commentator on these issues, as well as on video gaming, virtual reality, transgender politics, and media criticism. [1] The Associated Press, ‘A judge blocks part of an Alabama law that criminalizes gender-affirming medication’ ( NPR , Montgomery USA, 14 May 2022) < https://www.npr.org/2022/05/14/1098947193/a-judge-blocks-part-of-an-alabama-law-that-criminalizes-gender-affirming-medicat > accessed 19 May 2022; Zoe Richards, ‘Justice Department challenges Alabama law criminalizing transgender health care for minors’ ( NBC News , 30 April 2022) < https://www.npr.org/2022/05/14/1098947193/a-judge-blocks-part-of-an-alabama-law-that-criminalizes-gender-affirming-medicat > accessed 19 May 2022. [2] Romy Ellenbogen and Christopher O’Donnell, ‘Florida advises no social, hormonal treatment of transgender children’ Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida, 20 April 2022) < https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/04/20/florida-advises-no-social-hormone-treatment-of-transgender-children-in-new-guidance/ > accessed 19 May 2022. [3] Schuyler Mitchell, ‘The Right’s Creeping Pro-Natalist Rhetoric on Abortion and Trans Health Care’ ( The Intercept , 17 May 2022) < https://theintercept.com/2022/05/17/abortion-trans-health-care-pro-natalism-authoritarianism/ > accessed 19 May 2022; Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, ‘Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows’ ( Politico , 5 February 2022) < https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473 > accessed 19 May 2022. [4] Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, ‘The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule’ ( Freedom House , February 2022) < https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2022/global-expansion-authoritarian-rule > accessed 19 May 2022. Of note is the United States, which has slipped in Freedom House’s Democracy Index from a score of 89 in 2017 to a score of 83 in 2022. [5] The UK’s Telegraph has a particular obsession with the spectre of ‘gender ideology’. Cf. amongst many others Camilla Tominey, ‘‘Niche’ transgender ideology ‘corrosive’ to society, says report’ The Telegraph (London, 30 June 2020) < https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/30/niche-transgender-ideology-corrosive-society-says-report/ > accessed 24 June 2022; Debbie Hayton, ‘Why the Government must exempt gender-critical views from hate crime laws’ The Telegraph (London, 7 December 2021) < https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/07/government-must-now-exempt-gender-critical-views-hate-crime/ > accessed 24 June 2022; Telegraph View, ‘Reason should guide the gender identity debate’ The Telegraph (London, 2 April 2022) < https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2022/04/02/reason-should-guide-gender-identity-debate/ > accessed 24 June 2022. [6] See, for example, Anglo-American writer Andrew Sullivan, who expressed dismay that the moral panic he had helped to foment was spilling over to antagonise cisgender gay people like himself. Cf. Andrew Sullivan, ‘This is a perfectly sane teacher responding to kids’ questions. It seems increasingly clear that this campaign is now driven by vicious homophobia. Moderates take note’, ( Twitter , 4 April 2022) < https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1511008960446410754 > accessed 19 May 2022. [7] Ian Millhiser, ‘The constitutional problem with Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill’ ( Vox , 15 March 2022) < https://www.vox.com/2022/3/15/22976868/dont-say-gay-florida-unconstitutional-ron-desantis-supreme-court-first-amendment-schools-parents > accessed 19 May 2022. [8] Amanda Michelle Gomez, ‘Trans Woman’s Harassment on Metro Is Latest in Growing Number of Incidents Targeting LGBTQ+ People’ ( DCist , 14 April 2022) < https://dcist.com/story/22/04/14/trans-womans-harassment-on-dc-metro-reflects-growing-number-of-incidents/ > accessed 19 May 2022. [9] Jon Stone, ‘Boris Johnson takes credit for free bus pass after being told cash-strapped pensioners make trips to keep warm’ The Independent (3 May 2022) < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-bus-pass-pensioners-warm-b2070395.html > accessed 19 May 2022. [10] Ella Braidwood, ‘Daily Telegraph criticised for anti-trans NHS women’s wards article’ ( Pink News , 11 January 2019) < https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/01/11/daily-telegraph-transphobic-headline/ > accessed 19 May 2022; Emily Craig, ‘NHS accused of prioritising trans people for breast surgery over women with medical needs’ Daily Mail (London, 2 May 2022) < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10774277/NHS-accused-prioritising-male-female-trans-people-breast-surgery-women.html > accessed 19 May 2022; Katie Feehan, ‘NHS equality chiefs mutiny AGAINST ‘transphobic’ watchdog ruling that allows trans patients to be barred from single-sex wards if there is a legitimate reason’ Daily Mail (London, 6 April 2022) < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10690199/NHS-mutiny-AGAINST-watchdog-ruling-allows-trans-patients-barred-single-sex-wards.html > accessed 19 May 2022. Indeed, the Daily Mail has an entire subsection devoted to coverage of trans people, nearly all of it negative and sensationalist (see < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/transgender-issues/index.html >). Other newspapers in the UK are not far behind. [11] Trudy Ring , ‘Rash of Teen Suicide Attempts After Arkansas Adopts Trans Care Ban’ ( The Advocate , 19 April 2021) < https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2021/4/19/rash-teen-suicide-attempts-after-arkansas-adopts-trans-care-ban > accessed 19 May 2022. [12] Sabrina Imbler , ‘In Arkansas, Trans Teens Await an Uncertain Future’ The New York Times (New York, 18 January 2022) < https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/health/transgender-adolescents-arkansas.html > accessed 19 May 2022. [13] Rod Liddle , ‘I’m identifying as a young, black, trans chihuahua, and the truth can go whistle’ The Times (London, 11 November 2018) < https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-m-identifying-as-a-young-black-trans-chihuahua-and-the-truth-can-go-whistle-tq550nx5f > accessed 19 May 2022. [14] Jules Gill-Peterson, ‘Anti-Trans Laws Aren’t Symbolic. They Seek to Erase Us from Public Life’ ( Them , 18 April 2022) < https://www.them.us/story/anti-trans-laws-public-erasure-dont-say-gay > accessed 19 May 2022. [15] Monica Hesse, ‘Republicans thought defining a ‘woman’ is easy. Then they tried’ The Washington Post (6 April 2022) < https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/04/06/republican-woman-definitions/ > accessed 19 May 2022 [16] Susan Stryker, ‘( De)Subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgender studies ’ in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2013) 10. [17] ibid. [18] Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (USA). Note that the legislation does not attempt to define sex, only to include pregnancy and pregnancy-related discrimination (and, notably, to exclude most protection for abortion). [19] Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989) 490 U.S. 228, US Supreme Court. Among other things, this landmark U.S. Supreme Court case held that discrimination on the basis of gender presentation (i.e., a woman wearing masculine clothing and refusing to wear makeup) was indistinguishable from discrimination on the basis of sex because it required the discriminating party to make judgments based on their perception of the target’s sex. You cannot antagonise a trans woman for wearing high heels, say, without taking into account your belief that she is ‘really’ a man. The reality of this belief is irrelevant to the motivation for discrimination, and the Hopkins case has, therefore, been essential in providing a legal basis for transgender rights in the U.S. [20] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, ‘Sex-Based Discrimination’ < https://www.eeoc.gov/sex-based-discrimination > accessed 19 May 2022. [21] Kath Murray, Lucy Hunter Blackburn, and Lisa Mackenzie, ‘Reform ‘under the radar’? Lessons for Scotland from the Development of Gender Self-Declaration Laws in Europe’ (2020) 24(2) The Edinburgh Law Review 281–289; Callie H. Burt , ‘ Scrutinizing the U.S. Equality Act 2019: A Feminist Examination of Definitional Changes and Sociolegal Ramifications ’ (2020) 15(4) Feminist Criminology 363–409 . These papers are among the first to turn up in academic database searches for ‘sex-based rights’. Each of them offers an intervention against laws that would specifically protect trans people. Both pit the idea of ‘sex-based rights’ against transgender rights and represent novel constructions of women’s rights that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. As I note in the main body of this essay, the awkwardness and counterproductive nature of ‘sex-based rights’ as a phrase is easy to see when one attempts to use a similar phrase about race or any other protected category.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues to intensify as bombs increasingly hit city centres, destroying apartment buildings, theatres, and hospitals and killing civilians while the world watches. The brutal actions of the Russian army may seem inconceivable in the context of international norms but are not unimaginable for those who have actually been listening to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Fig 1. Several victims of starvation lay dead or dying on a busy sidewalk in residential Kharkiv. Photo from the collection of Samara Pearce, great granddaughter of the photographer Alexander Wienerberger. . President Putin has long made his convictions regarding Ukraine known, but few took him at his word. Driven by nostalgia for the Russian Empire as well as the USSR, Putin has made it clear that he seeks to destroy Ukraine as an independent state. Putin was more or less satisfied when the Kremlin-controllable common criminal Victor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s president. He never forgave Ukrainians for driving Yanukovych from office during their Maidan revolution eight years ago, and retaliated by annexing Crimea and beginning Russia’s war in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Since that time, Russian TV has kept up a drumbeat of hate and fear, dehumanizing Ukrainians and demonizing them as fascists and neo-Nazis. It has been Russian state policy to spread misinformation, priming the Russian public to root for, or at least accept, genocidal acts against the citizens of a peaceful, neighbouring state. The Russian media has for eight years told the Russian public that Ukrainians—particularly those who assert Ukraine’s right to independence—are evil and the enemy. The Russian soldiers who are firing missiles at Ukrainian cities today are part of that audience, which has been fed a steady diet of hate. Addressing the Russian people, President Putin continues to tell his citizens that Ukraine is led by drug-addled Nazis—a particularly ugly, cynical lie given that the Ukraine’s democratically elected President Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust. To his list of dangers that Ukrainians pose he has added the threat of a nuclear Ukraine, even though Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons when it became independent in exchange for what have turned out to be meaningless security guarantees, including from Russia. Western pundits have wasted too many words discussing whether Ukraine's aspiration to belong to NATO triggered the Russian president. The possibility of NATO membership was not on the table when Putin invaded Ukraine eight years ago. The demonization of Ukrainians as a prelude to genocide has a precedent. Under the tsars, Ukrainian efforts for freedom were suppressed, including bans on the use of the Ukrainian language. In the lead up to the Holodomor, the Soviet famine of 1932-33 in which millions of Ukrainians were starved to death, Soviet propaganda paved the way, casting the Ukrainian peasant farmers as kulaks, describing them as parasites and vermin and as a class that deserved and needed to be exterminated. Worth noting is that Rafael Lemkin, the lawyer who developed the concept of genocide as well as the term, considered the Holodomor part of a greater genocidal attack on Ukraine and Ukrainians. Fig 2. A farm woman, victim of starvation, lies behind a cart near a marketplace in Kharkiv. Photo from the collection of Samara Pearce, great granddaughter of the photographer Alexander Wienerberger. . The Holodomor also provides a precedent for the Kremlin lies and disinformation of the past weeks. Over the past weeks, Russian TV has insisted that Russian troops are fighting only in Donbas. There is no mention that Russia is bombing Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other Ukrainian cities, or of civilian deaths; Russian media also claims that the Russian army is fighting irregular formations of nationalists and not the Ukrainian army. These lies intend to hide the truth of the Kremlin’s actions, just as Soviet authorities in 1932-33 refused international offers of food aid, claiming that people were not starving. They continued to deny the Holodomor for more than 50 years. It took the fall of the USSR, when researchers finally gained access to archives, to prove what eyewitnesses and survivors had insisted upon—that the Kremlin had engaged in the intentional starvation of the Ukrainian countryside. The intelligence sources that correctly predicted today’s onslaught also warned that the Kremlin has already prepared arrest and kill lists of the Ukrainians most likely to lead resistance to the imposition of Kremlin rule. A number of mayors, journalists, and activists in Ukraine have already been kidnapped. In the 1990s, I lived in Ukraine and worked with civic organisations, and I fear now for the people I know who have devoted their lives to building civil society in their country. They are likely to be targeted for their commitment to the development of a democratic Ukraine. Today, as Executive Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (a project of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, which researches and educates about the genocidal famine in 1932-33), I fear for the Ukrainian academics I know. In Ukraine, historians are free to carry out their research. In Russia, historians who disagree with the Kremlin face persecution and imprisonment. Scholars engaged in the study of Ukrainian history and culture, as distinct from Russian, will certainly be targeted. Putin has made his intentions in Ukraine known—he is bent on destroying Ukrainians who assert their distinctiveness and who are willing to fight to preserve Ukraine as a sovereign state. Unlike during the Holodomor, when journalists were prevented from travelling to Ukraine to report on the suffering, today we are witnessing events in Ukraine in real time. We have no excuse. We know. The question is whether the world is willing to do what it takes to stop the Russian President who has already started down the path of genocide. Marta Baziuk Marta Baziuk is Executive Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta). She has more than 25 years’ experience in the not-for-profit sector, in Ukraine and North America.

The physical battlefield of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia is being closely scrutinised by the global community: each day, media platforms present their audience with maps, specked with shading and arrows, depicting the land lost or gained and troop movements of recent days. Behind the scenes, however, a shadowy battlefield of disinformation and political warfare rages just as strongly. The history of disinformation and political warfare Russia and the West are no strangers to information warfare and its potential to shift the balance of power in a conflict, turn the tide of an election, or destabilise a political regime. The most obvious recent example of this was Russian interference in the US Presidential Elections in 2016. Less well documented are the multitude of cyber-attacks perpetrated against Ukraine during the course of the past eight years. In 2014, Ukraine fell victim to Russian interference in its election as the Russian army simultaneously invaded and annexed Crimea. In 2015, suspected Russian cyber-operatives caused blackouts across the country. In 2017, a swathe of Ukrainian businesses and public services fell victim to Russian ransomware attacks, with hackers sharing the chilling message ‘We Do Not Forgive. We Do Not Forget. Expect Us’. Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, head of the East German Secret Police Active Measures Department X, described the significance of disinformation in warfare. He explained that ‘a powerful adversary can only be defeated through…a sophisticated, methodical, careful and shrewd effort to exploit even the smallest “cracks” between our enemies…and within their elites’. This is precisely what we saw in the rhetoric adopted by Russia in the run up to its annexation of Crimea and more recently in its justification for the invasion into Ukraine. The more polarised a country is, the more vulnerable it is to attack. Today, Russia seeks to pit Ukrainian against Ukrainian by defining the current war as a ‘special military operation’ to ‘protect people who…have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime’. By characterising the current Ukrainian leadership as ‘far right nationalists and neo-Nazis’ perpetrating crimes against humanity on their own people, President Putin plays on existing national division. Ukraine is waging its own form of information warfare. It is of note that media coverage, particularly in Western outlets, has picked up Ukraine's messaging and sought to amplify the success of Ukraine's military forces whilst depicting the Russians as ill-prepared and Russian soldiers as disenchanted, reluctant to turn on Ukrainians whom they regard as their brothers. A significant challenge arises, however, sorting facts from the propaganda of either side. Whilst the Kremlin has been widely criticised for blocking access to pro-West media in Russia—thereby allegedly restricting the flow of accurate reporting of the war to the Russian population—it is equally clear that Western media sources are not impartial. Indeed, Western officials have conceded that ‘while they cannot independently verify information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom’.[1] According to Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the Ukrainian communication strategy highlights ‘a shift taking place in modern conflicts, from a focus on munitions dropped to one centred in large part on messaging, media and persuasion’.[2] There are regular reports from both sides of the conflict of disinformation, including allegedly falsified records or accounts of incidents. An early example of this was reports of the attack on Snake Island.[3] More recently, a falsified BBC news report published by Russian News outlets asserted that the deadly attack on the train station in Kramatorsk was, in fact, perpetrated by the Ukrainian military.[4] In circumstances where nuggets of truth are disguised by layers of disinformation, the challenge of identifying and proving facts is clearly exacerbated. Establishing the facts is essential if we are to effectively hold perpetrators of war crimes to account. The International Criminal Court (the ‘ICC’)—prosecuting war crimes The ICC has a long—and somewhat chequered—history of prosecuting war crimes. Founded in 2002, it is governed by the Rome Statute and boasts 123 member states. Whilst its objectives are laudable, its practical success at holding perpetrators of war crimes to account is underwhelming. A key reason cited for this is limitations experienced by the court's investigators when it comes to evidence gathering, often rendering it impossible to secure convictions. The ICC's Prosecutor, Karim AA Khan QC, acknowledged this issue in his first speech to the Court when he took office in June 2021. He noted that ‘We cannot invest so much, we cannot raise expectations so high and achieve so little, so often in the courtroom. As an office, we need a greater realisation of what is required by the burden of proof and the obligation to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt’.[5] Historically, the ICC's investigators have faced difficulties arising out of the Court's relatively low funding for investigations, the unreliability of witness evidence, and the inaccessibility of areas in which the alleged crimes took place.[6] Article 61 of the Rome Statute requires that ‘the Prosecutor shall support each charge with sufficient evidence to establish substantial grounds to believe that the person committed the crime charged. The Prosecutor may rely on documentary or summary evidence…’.[7] It is here that the ICC has historically fallen short. Indeed, on a number of occasions, the Prosecutor has failed to clear the evidentiary threshold set out above that there is ‘substantial grounds to believe’ that the individual is responsible for the crimes for which they are charged.[8] It has been widely acknowledged by the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber that the evidentiary burden of ‘substantial grounds to believe’ requires the Prosecutor to ‘offer concrete and tangible proof demonstrating a clear line of reasoning underpinning [the] specific allegations’.[9] Further, in cases that have proceeded beyond the decision to charge an individual, judges have on several occasions dropped—or the Prosecutor has withdrawn—charges due to insufficient evidence.[10] The recent case against Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé On 31 March 2021, the Appeals Chamber of the ICC upheld the acquittal of the former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo (who held office from 2000 until his arrest in April 2011) and a former student union leader and minister of youth in Gbagbo's government, Charles Blé Goudé.[11] It is of note that the Pre-Trial Chamber originally adjourned the case in 2013 so as to give the Prosecutor more time to gather evidence. In its decision to adjourn, the Pre-Trial Chamber provided a helpful explanation of its role: it is the Chamber's duty to evaluate whether there is sufficient evidence for each of the ‘facts and circumstances’ advanced by the Prosecutor in order to satisfy all of the legal elements of the crime(s) and mode(s) of liability charged. The standard by which the Chamber scrutinizes the evidence is the same for all factual allegations, whether they pertain to the individual crimes charged, contextual elements of the crimes or the criminal responsibility of the suspect.[12] The Chamber explained that, at each stage of proceedings, there is higher evidentiary threshold that needs to be met. The Pre-Trial Chamber went on to clarify the ICC's expectations when it comes to the quality of evidence gathered: the Chamber considers that it would be unhelpful to formulate rigid formal rules, as each exhibit and every witness is unique and must be evaluated on its own merits. Nevertheless, the Chamber does consider it useful to express its general disposition towards certain types of evidence. As a general matter, it is preferable for the Chamber to have as much forensic and other material evidence as possible. Such evidence should be duly authenticated and have clear and unbroken chains of custody. Whenever testimonial evidence is offered, it should, to the extent possible, be based on the first-hand and personal observations of the witnesses.[13] The Prosecutor in this case was criticised by the Chamber for their heavy reliance on NGO reports and press articles when seeking to establish key elements of the case. The Court was clear that whilst reports and articles can provide valuable historical context, they are not a valid substitute for the type of evidence required to meet the evidentiary threshold for the confirmation of charges.[14] What does this mean for the current conflict? On 2 March 2022, Mr Khan QC announced that he was opening an investigation into the situation in Ukraine. Under Article 53 of the Rome Statute, prior to opening an investigation, a Prosecutor must consider whether the information available provides reasonable grounds to believe a crime is being, or has been, perpetrated within the jurisdiction and whether an investigation would serve the interest of the victims.[15] Mr Khan QC confirmed that the court had received referrals from 39 ICC member states and that the investigation would encompass events from 21 November 2013 onwards, including allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed on any part of the territory of Ukraine by any person. It is of note that the scope of the investigation is sufficiently broad to cover aggression perpetrated by the Ukrainian military or Ukrainian civilians as well as Russian forces.[16] Mr Khan QC is evidently aware of the ICC's reputation and appears determined to ensure that the failings of previous prosecutions do not apply to the current conflict. Whilst visiting Bucha, Ukraine on 13 April 2022, Mr Khan noted that ‘Truth is very often the first casualty of war’. With this in mind, the ICC has already installed an investigation team on the ground in Ukraine, including forensic scientists, forensic anthropologists, analysts, investigators, and lawyers, ‘so that [the ICC] can really make sure that we separate truth from fiction and go forward to insist on the rights of every individual, every child, every woman and every man to have their lives protected and not wantonly targeted’. Mr Khan QC has promised that ‘a truth [will emerge] in the end…in the courtroom, there is no place to hide and the truth ultimately emerges, whatever the tactics that may be employed or whatever the difficulties and hurdles that exist’.[17] Documenting War Crimes The international community, cognisant of the historic failures of the ICC to secure convictions as a result of insufficiently robust evidence, has established various services to assist with the collection and storage of evidence. By way of example, the Ukrainian Office of the Prosecutor General has created a site facilitating the proper documentation of war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Russian army in Ukraine. Evidence uploaded to the site ‘will be used to prosecute those involved in crimes in accordance with Ukrainian law, as well as in the International Criminal Court in the Hague and in a special tribunal after its creation’.[18] In addition, tech giants such as Google have created apps, such as the eyeWitness to Atrocities App, aimed at humanitarian organisations, investigators, and journalists documenting atrocities in conflict zones or other troubled regions around the world. The app's software enables users to encrypt and anonymously report incidents. Under the ICC's Rules of Procedure and Evidence it is within the Chamber's discretion to ‘assess freely all evidence in order to determine its relevance or admissibility’; further, either party can make an application to challenge the admissibility of evidence submitted by the other side. The Chamber has broad powers in determining whether evidence meets the standards required to be admissible in Court. That said, it is not permitted to ‘impose a legal requirement that corroboration is required in order to prove any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court’.[19] The impact of disinformation on prosecution The ultimate impact of disinformation warfare on the prosecution of war criminals—or indeed, the outcome of the current war in Ukraine—will remain unknown for the foreseeable future. That said, it is of serious concern that the expansion of disinformation warfare (and technical prowess with which it is perpetrated) creates real difficulties for reaching safe prosecutions. Mr Khan QC has noted that ‘We have to pierce the fog of war to get to the truth’, however, with increasingly sophisticated modes of deception this challenge should not be overlooked.[20] Recent reports from the Russian Ministry of Finance indicate that Russia has tripled its ‘mass media’ budget over the past year. Between January and March this year, the Russian government spent 17.4 billion roubles on ‘mass media’ in comparison with only 5.4 billion roubles during the same period last year, with reports suggesting this has been directed towards propaganda efforts.[21] Research indicates that repeated exposure to online falsehoods, even if those falsehoods have low levels of credibility, increases perceptions of veracity over time.[22] A concerning example of this is that a survey in the US revealed that almost one in five Americans believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, including that ‘the government, media and financial words in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation’.[23] Disinformation warfare is inconspicuous but insidious. It is clear, however, that the international community must recognise that a parallel war is underway and that it must arm itself to guard against disinformation in order to ensure proper and fair administration of justice in the years to come. Alexandra Agnew, Mishcon de Reya Alexandra Agnew is an Associate in the Politics & Law Team at Mishcon de Reya. Alexandra regularly advises clients in relation to government and political disputes. She was part of the team working on Gina Miller’s successful 2019 judicial review case into the legality of the Prime Minister’s prorogation of Parliament and advised whistleblowers in relation to their disclosures to the Equality and Human Rights Commission regarding widespread antisemitism in the Labour Party. Alexandra is also a member of Mishcon’s Purpose-litigation team which uses strategic litigation to drive constructive societal change in three key areas: Human Rights and Governance, the Environment, and Data Rights and Online Accountability. Mishcon de Reya is an independent law firm, which now employs more than 1200 people with over 600 lawyers offering a wide range of legal services to companies and individuals. With presence in London, Singapore and Hong Kong (through its association with Karas LLP), the firm services an international community of clients and provides advice in situations where the constraints of geography often do not apply. This article was written in May 2022. [1] Missy Ryan, Ellen Nakashima, Michael Birnbaum, and David L Stern, ‘Outmatched in military might, Ukraine has excelled in the information war’ The Washington Post (Washington, 16 March 2022). [2] ibid. [3] Zoya Sheftalovich, ‘“Go fuck yourself”, Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island tell Russian ship before being killed’ Politico (25 February 2022). [4] Pip Cook, ‘Putin hijacks BBC: Russia spreads terrifying video blaming Ukraine for missile attack’ Daily Express (London, 13 April 2022). [5] Susan Kendi, ‘Karim Khan’s first speech as ICC Prosecutor’ ( Journalists for Justice, 16 June 2021) < jfjustice.net/karim-khans-first-speech-as-icc-prosecutor/ >. [6] Christian M De Vos, ‘Investigating from Afar: The ICC's Evidence Problem’ (2013) 26 Leiden Journal of International Law 1009. [7] Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (adopted 17 July 1998, entered into force 1 July 2022) 2187 UNTS 38544 (Rome Statute) art 51. [8] Patryk Labuda, ‘The ICC’s “evidence problem”: The future of international criminal investigations after the Gbagbo acquittal’ ( Völkerrechtsblog , 18 January 2019) < voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-iccs-evidence-problem/ >. [9] Prosecutor v Laurent Gbagbo (Pre-Trial Chamber, Decision adjourning the hearing on confirmation of charges pursuant to article 61(7)(c)(i) of the Rome Statute) ICC-02/11-01/11 (3 June 2013). [10] International Criminal Court, Cases < https://www.icc-cpi.int/cases?f%5B0%5D=accused_states_cases%3A356 >. [11] ‘ICC Appeals Chamber confirms Trial Chamber I’s decision acquitting Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé of all charges of crime against humanity’ (International Criminal Court, 31 March 2021) < https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-appeals-chamber-confirms-trial-chamber-decision-acquitting-laurent-gbagbo-and-charles-ble >. [12] Prosecutor v Laurent Gbagbo (n 9) [19]. [13] ibid [26-27]. [14] ibid [35]. [15] Rome Statue (n 7) art 53. [16] ‘Statement of ICC Prosecutor, Karim AA Khan QC, on the Situation in Ukraine: Receipt of Referrals from 39 States Parties and the Opening of an Investigation’ (International Criminal Court, 2 March 2022) < https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-qc-situation-ukraine-receipt-referrals-39-states >. [17] Catherine Philp, ‘Truth will out about Russian war crimes in Ukraine, says British prosecutor’ The Times (London, 13 April 2022). [18] ‘Criminal liability for # RussianWarCrimes!’ < https://warcrimes.gov.ua/ >. [19] ‘Rules of Procedure and Evidence’, Official Records of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, First session, New York, 3-10 September 2002 (ICC-ASP/1/3 and Corr.1), part II.A (Rules 63-64). [20] Philp (n 17). [21] Tom Ball, ‘Russians create fake BBC news video to blame Ukraine for bombing’ The Times (London, 13 April 2022). [22] Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone D Cannon, and David G Rand, ‘Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news’ (2018) 147 Journal of Experimental Psychology 1865. [23] ‘The Persistence of QAnon in the Post-Trump Era: An Analysis of Who Believes the Conspiracies’ (PRRI, 24 February 2022) < www.prri.org/research/the-persistence-of-qanon-in-the-post-trump-era-an-analysis-of-who-believes-the-conspiracies/ >.

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University. He’s written multiple books on international relations theory, global governance and world order. He has received awards for his ‘contribution to non-Western IR theory and inclusion’ in international studies. In 2020, he received American University’s highest honour: Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award. CJLPA : Could you tell me about your journey to becoming a renowned scholar of international relations? Professor Amitav Acharya : I never see myself that way—rather, I would say I’m a reluctant academic. I embarked on a PhD because it would take me to Australia, which sounded like a fun place to be, rather than going with the aim of being an academic. Once there, I began to like the idea of being an academic, because it seemed freer, you get to meet very interesting people and can travel a lot, attending conferences and doing field work. So, I grew into academia, rather than having a lifelong ambition for it. The moral of the story is that sometimes you don’t know what you want to be. I decided to stay as an academic maybe after 10 years of doing different things—being a research fellow or being a lecturer—only then did I settle into this. If there’s one thing that drove me to write and do my best, it was the need to challenge the Western-dominated knowledge and literature that we have in the field. That was almost personal. Growing up in India, in the Global South, it hits you when you start reading all these textbooks, articles, and journals that a lot of it is just not right . They are trying to impose theories and ideas that were originally developed in a European or US foreign policy context onto the rest of the world. I almost instinctively rebelled against it—and I’m not the only one. I thought that there must surely be better explanations that capture the voices, experiences, and histories of the people who are being written about. For instance, theories like realism or liberalism claim to be universal but they mostly come out of what happened in Europe centuries earlier. Or consider the theory of Hegemonic Stability, which really captures and legitimises the role of United States as ‘the manager’ of the world order, with a pronounced bias to accentuate its benign effects while downplaying its dark sides, such as intervention in and exploitation of weaker and poorer nations. Hearing that made me a sceptic—and gave me the energy and drive to publish. Even now, my writing is always driven by the idea that I need to challenge what people are talking about in the mainstream media and literature. Challenging that has been my main motivating force. Almost every major thing I’ve written and all the concepts I’ve created around my work—like norm localization, global international relations (IR), post-hegemonic multilateralism, the multiplex world order—are driven by the same push from within myself to challenge Western-centric IR theories and concepts. CJLPA : That leads very well into my next question. You’ve explored the Global South, and you’ve sought to counter the dominating influence of European history and international relations theory development. Do you think that IR teaching today has managed to move past Eurocentrism? AA : Oh, far from it. In fact, I see a backlash coming up now. Certainly, a lot depends on where you are. If you are in Asia or Africa, you challenge it but are constrained by the fact that most of the textbooks, literature, and journals are produced in the West—that knowledge production is intimately focused and concentrated in the West. In the West, especially the United States and more specifically the elite US universities which produce the bulk of the PhDs, those who will be the next generation of teachers, the majority remain very much beholden to the same Western narrative. Although there’s now a growing demand for globalising IR, which I have been pushing for, there’s still considerable backlash against it. There was a 2014 survey by the College of William and Mary, of scholars in the US, Europe, and some other parts of the world.[1] The first question was: ‘Do you think international relations is American-centric/Western-centric?’. The majority of the people said yes, it is. The second question, crucially, was: ‘What can we do about it? Should it be reversed?’. The answers are slightly patterned: non-white IR scholars were far more likely to support the challenging of Western or American hegemony in IR teaching.[2] So, it’s one thing to recognise what’s happening and quite another thing to do something about it. There is a kind of a Gramscian hegemony, and a collective vested interest in keeping the discipline as it is. People find all sorts of ways to suppress alternative voices, especially those that emphasise decolonization of the discipline. I can see it in the way universities or journal publishers hire, fire, and promote their faculties. The big universities and the places of academic privilege see the alternative work of scholars in a negative light, not worthy of recognition. This affects students. My students ask me: but can we get a job ‘doing’ global IR? At the American University, where I teach, we had several seminars and roundtables inviting IR stars from around the world to get answers to these questions. Some of them say that it’s possible, but most of them think that there is a lot of gatekeeping, a lot of resistance to accepting globalising IR in elite Western universities. I’m afraid it may be getting worse in some ways. How many universities, especially the big places of knowledge production, have scholars from the Global South or racial minorities holding prestigious chairs in IR? IR remains very much white. I became more conscious of it as I got into the question of race in international relations. The paper in International Affairs ’ 100th anniversary issue gave me a greater opportunity to think about how racism is reproduced in academia.[3] I realised not only that the curriculum is racist in many ways, directly or indirectly, but also that there’s an attempt to deny when problems arise and to suppress voices that speak to issues like colonialism and race. Universities and IR departments pay lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion, buzzwords now in academic circles, especially managers and administrators, out of political correctness. But when it comes to hiring non-white people into their departments, or when it comes to encouraging research and publications by these scholars, and when scholars from the Global South want to use alternative narratives derived from their own cultures, traditions, and contributions, there is much gatekeeping, overt or implicit. The establishment bites back; it is in a privileged position that it does not want to give up. I’m not saying that because I’m cynical. I’ve done quite well for myself, but I’m concerned about the scholars who live in the Global South—who are increasingly becoming the global majority in the study of international relations—who are struggling to get recognised, or to get their voices heard. CJLPA : I’m going to move away from your experience of teaching and look towards your published work. Your book Constructing World Order is about how a world order was established in the post-Second World War era, and its development into the 1990s. It’s known for advancing a new perspective on the role that non-Western, postcolonial states have played in the process of creating that world order by showing that they weren’t as passive in the process as we have been told. Could you talk me through the crux of your argument and how you reached your conclusion? AA : The contributions and agency of the Global South—some of them would be in creating norms of human rights, for instance—have been hidden from view. We are told continuously that the West invented all human rights, that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was led by Eleanor Roosevelt. But if you study the records, the documents, you’ll find that if Mrs. Roosevelt had had her way the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would say rights of all men , not all human beings .[4] The reason it was changed to refer to the equality of all human beings is due to an Indian delegate to the UN Convention—Hansa Mehta—who argued with Mrs. Roosevelt. I think billions of people around the world owe it to her, for standing up and saying that we can’t have this male-dominant expression. Similarly, a challenge to the traditional way of looking at development and security, which is very GDP-centric, was originally proposed by a Pakistani economist, Mahbub ul Haq, who worked with a likeminded Indian scholar (the two first met at Cambridge University as students) and Nobel Laureate in economics Amartya Sen. They looked at their own countries, India and Pakistan, and found that these countries were spending too much money on defence and too little on human development. They came up with the idea that we have to ignore the idea of economic growth measured exclusively using GDP. Instead, we should look at human potential, by taking care of education and public health. It’s a very inspiring story, which gave birth to the UNDP’s widely used Human Development Index and Human Development Report, yet hardly anyone knows about it. Unless you are an expert, it’s not in the mainstream books or in the introductions to international relations. I wrote about it in the chapter on human security for the Globalisation of World Politics textbook, among Britain’s most popular textbooks, and I put in a case study of my home state in India: Orissa. I found that there are many more examples of Global South agency—in sustainable development, in human rights, in security, in disarmament. In fact, the first person in the world to talk about a ban on nuclear testing was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. A lot of this is hidden from view, partly because of the structural bias against the Global South in our academia, especially in textbooks and in the institutions that teach and train in international relations.[5] CJLPA : In the same book, there are two pillars—security and sovereignty—on which the global order is developed. Are there more pillars that you would consider today, such as sustainability, newer concerns on which the global order is being shaped? AA : I mainly talk about security and sovereignty because those are the two areas that I am most familiar with, but sustainability is touched upon in the book’s last chapter, and in the context of the discussion of human security. The whole idea of Constructing Global Order, and my earlier work on which the book drew, was to develop a theory of agency beyond the traditional narrow view which equates agency with the material power of Western nations. The book holds that agency is also ideational and normative, and comes as much from the Global North as from the Global South. I now see that scholars have been increasingly applying this broader view of agency to all kinds of issue areas. For example, I was involved in a project at SOAS University which looked at the role played by women in the making of the UN. My theory of agency fit well in this research, and that is where the story of Hansa Mehta and her contribution came up.[6] You can find much evidence of non-Western or Global South agency in a whole variety of elements of the global order, whether it’s security, sovereignty, development, ecology, human rights. And not just today, or in contemporary times, but throughout history. My latest project is focused on a history of world order, where I find key institutions and ideas of world ordering, such as humanitarianism in war or freedom of seas, while credited to the West, had other points of origin, in non-Western civilizations. For example, the Roman empire is often credited with promoting freedom of the seas and free trade. But it was underwritten by Roman imperialism, which incorporated all the major states of the Mediterranean. By contrast, in the Indian Ocean, where there was no hegemony like Rome’s over the Mediterranean, there were no restrictions on who could trade where. The jurisdiction of empires like those of the Moghuls never extended to the sea. Instead, a group of trading states maintained a vibrant and open trading network, the largest oceanic trading system in the world until the Atlantic trade created by European imperialism in the Americas. That was freedom of the seas in practice without anyone’s hegemony. In fact, when the Portuguese first went to the Indian Ocean, they found out that there was no division of the sea into the spheres of influence—anybody could trade as long as you paid customs. The idea of freedom of seas has also been credited to Hugo Grotius, but Grotius had been exposed to the practice of maritime openness that had prevailed in the Indian Ocean through papers supplied to him by the Dutch East India Company, on whose payroll he was. The Dutch East Indian Company initially fought against Portuguese monopoly in the Indian Ocean, but then itself went on to impose an imperialistic monopoly over what is today Indonesia, with its actions defended by Grotius himself. How many IR scholars know about this? Regarding humanitarian principles of warfare, or what is today called just war, the injunctions against, say, torture, killing of civilians, or harming combatants who have surrendered that one finds in the so-called Geneva Conventions can be found almost principle by principle in ancient India’s Code of Manu. There are many such examples of agency out there which are not captured in the mainstream literature, so it has been my passion to uncover this and bring it to the IR field. I’m sure there are other scholars, especially historians, who are doing similar work. But putting it in a global IR context has not been done, and I hope more people will get into this field. CJLPA : In your conception of international relations, you’ve coined the term ‘multiplex world’ and used the analogy of modern cinema. Could you elaborate on this term, and the curious analogy for it? AA : I was thinking about how we can sit in different movie theatres under the same roof and choose to see from a wide-ranging bunch of themes, plots, actors, styles. This is unlike the times of the monoplex, where there was only one movie in one theatre—we had to wait until it had run before we could go to see another one. Even if you take the view that Hollywood dominates the multiplex cinema today, in countries like India, people watch more Bollywood and regional movies than Hollywood ones. In China, which is becoming one of the world’s most lucrative markets for foreign movies, there are more and more Chinese-produced and directed films. Hollywood increasingly relies on markets like China’s for its earnings. Hence it must cater to the local tastes of an increasingly global audience. When applying this to the world order, it means that the world also has more choices to build it with. They’re not just going to look at the Western-dominated or American-led ‘liberal international order’. It’s partly because it was never very peaceful for the developing world. It was also not very economically beneficial to many postcolonial nations. It led to uneven development, inequality, and resource exploitation. It benefited mostly the Western countries. There were a lot of military interventions, and a lot of double standards in promoting democracy, human rights, and development in the Global South. Hence, non-Western countries have started to look for alternative ideas—sometimes from their own historical contexts or by looking at other, more successful developing nations like China. In this multiplex postcolonial order, the rising powers like China, India, or others are trying to develop their own ideas and approaches to development, stability, and ecology, sometimes with pathways that fit their own history and culture. The world is being decentralised, becoming post-hegemonic as the relative power of the West is declining. The second thing we see is that in global governance, the UN and related institutions are no longer the only leaders. We see the rise of a lot of other types of institutions, including regional groups, whether in Africa, in Southeast Asia, or for that matter in the West itself, as in Europe, where the EU now governs many aspects of life in its member nations. There are also newer development bodies like the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). In that sense, there is an ongoing decentring from what was at one point (in the 1950s) supposed to be a universal system of global governance. Now we have non-state actors, transnational civil society, corporations, foundations getting into the business of global cooperation. Culturally, it’s not just one set of ideas—liberal ideas, or democracy, or capitalism—that are the only sources of progress for many nations. We also have communitarian ideas, more nationalistic ideas, which are not necessarily conforming to liberalism and democracy, for better or for worse. To put it simply, the idea of an ‘end of history’ that Francis Fukuyama once talked about, that capitalism and democracy will prevail over everything else, is far from happening. The world order today is best understood through the hybridity of ideas: the Western liberal ideas and non-Western ideas interacting with one another. Ideationally, we are not in a hegemonic world. We are in a post-hegemonic or multiplex world. We have different types of ideologies and ideas—communitarianism, liberal individualism, socialism, extremist, radical ideas—and they all need to be acknowledged. We have a mix of regional and inter-regional orders, connected yet distinct from each other, instead of a single, overarching so-called universal global order. Bringing all this together—the relative erosion of American hegemony; the rise of new powers like China, India and their ideologies; as well as the decentralising of global governance—you get a much more pluralistic world order, rather than a singular Western-dominated, American-imposed world order. This is the essence of what I have called a multiplex world. A world of multiple agents, multiple ideas, manifold dimensions: that’s what the application of the multiplex concept to world order looks like.[7] CJLPA : In this moment of time, with a war in Ukraine and a highly economically interconnected world dealing with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, how do you think the global order is changing, if at all? AA : Both the pandemic and Ukraine have challenged the existing liberal international world order. They certainly haven’t finished world order—one shouldn’t conflate the liberal international order under Western dominance with world order generally—but both cases have given more ammunition, more strength, more force to this idea of a multiplex world. The events in Ukraine, and the swift and comprehensive Western sanctions against Russia, led many Western pundits to gloat over how ‘the West is coming back’. These people see this as the victory or triumph of the idea of the West. Yet, one should not forget that Ukraine also represents a failure of the West to lead and manage peace and stability with the help of the ideas and institutions, including the EU and NATO, that the West itself built. It specifically means that major war is back in Europe—something that we haven’t seen since World War II. I, on the other hand, argue that this is another nail in the coffin of the liberal international order because the majority of the Global South don’t back either side. Whilst many of them condemned Russia, some key players like South Africa, India, and China, did not. Also, whilst Brazil and Mexico voted for the UN General Assembly resolution against Russia, they rejected the West’s sanctions that came with it. And condemning Russian invasion is not the same as accepting Western dominance, especially as many non-Western countries keep in mind the provocation of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion as a factor in the conflict. The NATO-Ukraine-Russia war will accelerate the trend towards a multiplex world as non-Western countries lose trust in both the West and Russia to deal with future conflicts. Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a similar dynamic where many Global South countries did not like what they saw in China. China’s denial of COVID when it broke out, its refusal to take early action that might have limited the spread of the virus, and the fact that it still refuses to allow a thorough investigation of the outbreak, all this mean that China is not the model for the rest of the world, and it has undercut China’s soft power quite a bit. The United States also behaved in a most selfish way, under Trump, who was basically blaming China, blaming everybody except himself, while letting Americans get infected in the millions and die in the hundreds of thousands. What do people outside say when they see this? They say, ‘neither USA nor China’. We have to find another model, maybe a New Zealand model or maybe South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan. I see multiplexity in all this. In this sense, a ‘third way’, neither the West nor the Russia/China bloc, is the path to the future stability and well-being of the world. CJLPA : In this increasingly multiplex world, how can states ensure better outcomes for humanity, whether that’s people that they’re directly responsible for within their state and/or other parties they take an interest in caring for? Can we guarantee less conflict and less uncertainty? AA : We cannot guarantee either less conflict or less uncertainty going forward, but keep in mind that there was a lot of conflict in the previous world order. Although one cannot predict the future, that doesn’t mean everything is gloom and doom. There’s a lot of scaremongering going on, claiming that the whole world is now on fire. I’ve heard this repeatedly for the last 30 years, before COVID-19 and Ukraine. But ironically, whereas most Western analysts predicted a major war in Asia for a long time, such a war has already happened in Europe first. Outside of Europe, we would continue to see more internal wars than inter-state wars. At the same time, even though the idea of the liberal world order may be weakening, it doesn’t mean people are just breaking away from institutions and interdependence. I also think that what is happening now need not be permanent. We will ultimately see some sort of resolution to the Ukraine conflict. We will also see some sort of revival of multilateralism. Because it’s not just a normative moral aspiration, it is in the self-interest of the actors. CJLPA : You say you don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’d still like your thoughts on the multiplex world and the challenge of climate change. Are there going to be more kinds of solutions or is it going to become more chaotic? AA : In my edited book, Why Govern? Rethinking Demand and Progress in Global Governance , contributed to by specialists on global governance, we found that pluralization and multiplexity—sometimes called complexity and fragmentation—is already happening in climate change.[8] Look at the Paris Accords: it doesn’t work the way normal multilateral organisations do. It is based on voluntary compliance—which is the ASEAN way of doing things, not the European way. By adopting a consensus-based ASEAN-style decision-making and compliance model, the international community was able to achieve consensus and co-operation that had eluded it for a long time, because it had been looking for strict legalistic standards and measures. Also, it was done not by governments only. There are a lot of expert groups, NGOs, corporations, parts of civil society involved. The whole idea of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that they are not bureaucrats, they’re scientists, who operate within a governmental-plus framework. I call it ‘G-plus global governance’. In a G-Plus model, leadership in global governance is not the monopoly of big powers and their national governments. In fact, the most striking example is that it was the European Union that really got it together, not the US, nor China, the largest economies in the world. Leadership also depends on the issue areas. So maybe the European Union leads in climate change. China certainly leads in international development. The United States, when it wants to, can play a role in collective security, like Iraq in 1990-91. However, today in the case of Ukraine, the US is playing the power bloc, or alliance game. India can play a role because its largest vaccine manufacturer in the world and also one of the largest manufacturers of generic drugs—so in terms of scientific and technological contribution, India is a big leader. We see the G-plus model in action, which is an integral feature of multiplexity, rather than singularity, or hegemony in global governance and world order. That world is going to be ruled and operate very differently from 40 years ago, but that doesn’t mean all hell is going to break loose. Countries and leaders are not going to get into conflict with each other just because they are non-Western and do not buy typical Western liberal ideas. The idea that only the West can manage stability because the West has the best ideas and approaches to peace and development, and that all the other countries are incapable of producing peace and development, is a legacy of the colonial and racist origins of the present world order. It is time to reject them, and move past them. Only then can one establish new and much needed ways of managing world order. CJLPA : Thank you Professor, that’s a good note to end on. Thank you for your time and your expertise. This interview was conducted by Richa Kapoor, the Impact Officer at Social Market Foundation. Prior to this role, she graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. She contributed an article to the first issue of CJLPA , before becoming an editor for the second. [1] Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al, ‘The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey’ (2014) 18(1) International Studies Review 16-32. [2] Amitav Acharya, ‘Advancing Global IR: Challenges, Contentions and Contributions’ (2016) 18(1) International Studies Review 8. [3] Amitav Acharya, ‘Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order’ (2022) 98(1) International Affairs 23-43. [4] Acharya (n 2) 2. [5] Cf. Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global Order (Cambridge University Press 2018). [6] Cf. Amitav Acharya, Rebecca Adami, and Dan Plesch, ‘Commentary: The Restorative Archeology of Knowledge about the role of Women in the History of the UN - Theoretical implications for International Relations’ in Rebecca Adami and Dan Plesch (eds), Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights (Routledge 2021). [7] Cf. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (2nd edn, Polity Press 2018). [8] Cf. Amitav Acharya (ed), Why Govern? Rethinking Demand and Progress in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press 2016).

There is a certain irony in a prisoner of law receiving a prize given by lawyers. Something must have gone very wrong when one who pledged to serve the law receives recognition instead for allegedly breaking the law. So perhaps this is a good opportunity to reflect on the lawyer’s relationship with the law, or more broadly, the rules-based order—whether national or international. As lawyers, we were trained on law as it should be—as an impartial guardian of justice and freedom, grounded in truth and equality, enacted in a democratic spirit. We build our theories and practices, including professional rules, norms, and principles, on how to understand and interact with the law, based on such an idealized conception of what law is. But this is akin to building our practice on a myth. For the real world is a much less happy place; most of humanity do not live under conditions of justice or anywhere near it. They must live with laws that oppress, not protect. They are exploited by laws that they have no say in making or shaping. Laws that suffocate them never touch the elites. The people out there experience the law as it is, not as it should be—as high principles that sound good but taste bad. For lawyers who are not content to live in a myth, how should we conduct ourselves with regard to the real laws? When the constitution mandates a Party’s absolute leadership, does allegiance to the law require honouring one-party rule? When a law is secretly made and suddenly sprung on the populace, do you accept or reject its authority? When you know full well that senseless and burdensome rules are only selectively imposed on the disfavoured, do you counsel disregard for the law or insist on equal enforcement? When rights written into laws are in practice honoured in the breach, and when renouncing those rights is the surer path to safety, do you advise your clients on the law-as-it-is or the law-as-it-should-be? For this is the reality myself and my colleagues are living with, day in, day out. The idolization of law is of course, not limited to lawyers. A common refrain by politicians across the world these days is the need to uphold a ‘rules-based international order’. Not rights-based, not values-based, but rules-based. Perhaps the concept of ‘rules’ is seen to be less political, more neutral, less divisive. Agreeable to both democrats and autocrats alike. But herein lies the catch—autocrats like this formulation too precisely because a rules-based order can serve them just as well. Rules, or laws, do not run themselves, but are dependent on people who make them, interpret them, and enforce them. They are not divine, absolute truth, but rather creatures of habits and accidents, design and oversight, aspirations and baseness. Ultimately, laws are statements of power. Far from being a panacea for a troubled world, laws propped up by unjust power could bring about the greatest nightmare. History is strewn with examples of the law’s crimes. The most oppressive state is seldom the failed state that abjures law and order, but a pervasive state that excels at using law to order society to unsavoury ends. The Holocaust did not happen because of a lack of rules, but because of rules made by the Nazi party. Apartheid was not a natural order, but the result of rules imposed by a white minority. Millions of Uighurs were not interned because of arbitrary reprisal, but because of a systematic policy implemented through a plethora of rules and regulations. And in the city I call home, a national security law unilaterally imposed by Beijing made ‘criminals’ out of many friends of mine, who are scholars, legislators, lawyers, journalists, unionists, and activists—namely, law-abiding citizens doing what they have always done, what they consider their duty. An unjust system also needs rules to function and to perpetuate itself, as much as a just system needs them. Indeed, rules can often cloak injustice with a veil of institutional legitimacy, facilitating the implementation of evil at scale through bureaucratic efficiency and indifference. When the Great Firewall of China becomes a routine fact of life backed up by the authority of laws, few continue to acknowledge it as the gross human rights violation that it is. But surely this massive infrastructure to wall off free information is a daily violation of the rights of billions to information, expression, and communication. Further, in producing a trapped audience that amounts to one-sixth of the world’s population, it provides a solid base for disinformation and prejudice to take root and spread, which in turn exports pressure to censor and poisons debates well beyond the Chinese border. Yet tech companies—local and foreign alike—are untroubled by their participation in the world’s largest attempt at thought control, since they can always say that they are merely ‘complying with legal requirements’. Law thus becomes an excuse to calm our conscience, numbing us to the part we play in evil. ‘Rules are rules’, say the officials, say the judges, say the prison warden. And the elephant in the room snorts. Who made the rules, anyway? The problem goes beyond bad actors intentionally making bad laws. It is also about how laws are applied to the real world. Where a law is explicitly made for an objectionable purpose, we can easily point that out and say, let’s repeal this, or even, let’s disobey this. But situations of such moral clarity are relatively rare. More often, what we face is the illegitimate use of otherwise legitimate laws. In Hong Kong, thousands of protesters are currently incarcerated by a colonial era law on public order, not by a Beijing-made law. Our police’s favourite weapon for bludgeoning free speech is a long dormant British law, the law on sedition. And last month, a man who took some photos on a hilltop with hand-held slogans was arrested for allegedly breaching regulations protecting the countryside. We also see money laundering laws cited as reasons to refuse bank service to NGOs and dissidents, laws on foreign agents abused to strangle and slander rights organisations, and fire and building regulations weaponised to harass shops and groups with pro-democracy sympathies. Laws on money laundering, public order, and fire safety of course have their place in any legal system. Yet again, laws do not enforce themselves but are enforced—and observed—by men. In a society suffused with the lopsided power of the state, such an imbalance inevitably corrupts the execution of laws. When state power goes unchecked, the legal system as a whole is degraded, which cannot be saved by blaming it ills on a few bad laws. The opposite side of the same coin is the increasing impotence of so called ‘good’ laws, chief among them being human rights laws. Yes, our constitution largely adopts the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but that has not stopped the continuing crackdown on civil society. Officials unabashedly proclaim their respect for rights while trampling on them with impunity. Without people committed to—and with the power of—realizing them, human rights laws are but decorative frills on the statute book. Dictators have little qualms in publicly ‘committing’ to the loftiest principles since they are not bound by them. Instead of allowing such commitments to constrain their action, they use those words to constrain how reality can be perceived, such that their ‘righteousness’ can never be shaken. Forced labour in Xinjiang does not exist. Allegation of torture is foreign propaganda. Nothing happened on Tiananmen Square on that fateful day 34 years ago. With the law on the side of the state, contradictory voices and facts are easily suppressed, discredited and eliminated from view. As shown by the fact that I must speak to you from prison, and the fact that most Chinese people would never know why Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi are imprisoned—or have even heard of their names. Impunity at home transposes to impunity abroad. In a world order built on the concept of sovereign states, a government’s global action is constrained only insofar as effective constraints exist domestically. Thus the Chinese government is not shy of acceding to, or themselves proposing, rules of international engagement that sound fairly high-minded, because hardly anyone—least of all its own people—can hold it to account. It can propose the building of a ‘community with a shared future for mankind’ while destroying every sense of community among its people, producing a highly atomised society. It can tout respect for diversity in a so-called Global Civilization Initiative, while running a ruthless machinery of censorship and engaging in harsh repression against cultural and religious minorities. It can advocate sustainable development while hobbling all grassroots attempt to monitor environmental ills. It argues for the democratization of international institutions while assuming even more totalitarian control. It urges respect for a people’s choice of their own system of governance while never giving that choice to its people. Still we see more and more countries, from Chile to Nigeria, Serbia to Indonesia, and even UN Secretary General António Guterres expressing support for these ‘major global initiatives’. When other countries sign onto these seemingly benign initiatives of China, they should be aware that they are not entering into genuine, mutual agreement of principles but a propaganda drive to reshape reality. The power of these initiatives is less in their content and more in their number of ‘adherents’. The more people echo these formulations, the more prestige accrues to the proposer, the more credible is their version of reality. The form of these words become all important while the words themselves lose meaning. It is in fact, Václav Havel’s story of the greengrocer repeated on a global scale. If the problem is just about empty promises and misused provisions, then the rules-based order is perhaps still salvageable. All we need to do is to call out the rule-breakers, and when the opportunity comes, reactivate those neglected provisions. Or can we? Not if the meaning of the rules has completely changed. Again, the experience of Hong Kong provides a cautionary tale. Many of the worst violations in human rights of the past few years were sanctioned by or enforced through the courts, but not because judges suddenly forget our human rights laws. Rather, those laws are reinterpreted in a way that is compatible with gross human rights violations, through subtle shifts in the meaning of words and concepts integral to that discourse. For example, the concept of ‘national security’ used to have a fairly definite ambit, being internationally recognised as a legitimate reason to restrict rights. However, since the advent of the National Security Law, the term has taken on an ever more expansive and partisan meaning, to the point that a common citizen speaking her mind can be considered a national security threat justifying indefinite pre-trial detention—if her views might contradict with those of the Party. The language of rights and balance is still there, but the substance has completely changed. And there is little pushback from the judiciary to such shift in meaning of ‘national security’—instead, the Party’s narrative on the term is swallowed whole in the name of deference and entrenched through successive case law. Here we see how sensible legal principles developed in a democratic context, such as deference or emphasis on legislative intent, could lead to contradiction and injustice when transplanted to an undemocratic system. For the ‘legislative intent’ behind laws such as the National Security Law is quite clear, and if an independent court, groomed in the common law tradition, sincerely sees its mission as the implementation of such intent, then even an ‘independent court’ would in practice become the enforcer of the Party’s partisan will. In a similar vein, the scope of what counts as peaceful protests has been steadily compressed by an ever looser interpretation of ‘violence’, which led to lengthy jail terms for thousands of protesters who have not themselves committed any act of violence, but were merely present at, or near to, a scene where violence erupted. Thus we find even first aiders and mediators sentenced to years of imprisonment as ‘rioters’, all while the right to ‘peaceful’ demonstration is expressly honoured. A similar trend is occurring in the realm of what counts as hate speech, where criticism, or even just sarcasm, are increasingly equated with the stroking of hatred. Indeed, what you are now reading is likely to fall within that amorphous realm of ‘inciting hatred’ by the standard of new Hong Kong, and thus, not entitled to free speech protection in our law. While on the surface we still speak the same language of rights as adopted from international instruments and precedents, in practice a huge gulf has emerged between our courts’ understanding of rights and international standards. Words and their meaning are ultimately malleable, and judges are not miraculously insulated from how the wider society perceives words and constructs narratives. Quite the opposite, in fact: a healthy legal discourse cannot be had without the courts engaging in an open, continuous conversation with the society on important principles such as justice and rights, through citizens and lawyers who bring and defend cases, construct arguments, highlight injustices, and criticize or celebrate key judgments. Where such conversation is largely free and democratic, we might manage to approach justice. Where it is stunted or captured by partisan interests or, worse, by an overbearing state, legal discourse suffers. I have already alluded to the myriad ways in which the Party-state can influence judicial reasoning. Such shifts in meaning and interpretation do not occur overnight, making them all the more difficult to detect and resist. Each step builds on the last, with plausible sounding legal justifications, until step by innocuous step we end up in a completely unrecognisable place, where prisoners of conscience populate our prisons. Protestations that our judiciary is still ‘independent’ are quite beside the point; the Party simply has little need of old style, explicit direction of individual cases when political control already permeates every pore of society. Such overt interference is rather, a last resort and a sign of failure. When the ‘independent’ court is ‘voluntarily’ jailing dissenters and destroying civil society, why interfere? What happened in Hong Kong is not an anomaly but a warning. The Party’s power to redefine words and subvert their meaning does not stop at the Chinese border. And unlike during the Cold War, when one could identify and counter a distinct communist ideology and phraseology, today’s China is speaking the same liberal language of rights, democracy, and peace. Crucial differences of course still exist, but they are camouflaged under a raft of comforting phrases. Those of us who live under the Party’s rule know that these familiar terms carry very different meanings in Party-speak. Rights are not about what individuals can assert against the state, but about empowering the state to safeguard the ‘rights’ of the people. Democracy is not about citizens holding leaders accountable through free association, expression, and election, but about leaders ‘graciously’ listening to the voice of the people through controlled channels. And peace is about ensuring submission to the Party’s order through whatever means, not the rejection of war or hatred. With China’s growing stature, its way of using and interpreting words is inexorably seeping into international discourse. Sometimes this is a pure power play, as when it strongarms other nations into echoing its proposals and positions. At other times it is a matter of practicality; if one wishes to communicate with China, its way of understanding key concepts in that dialogue cannot just be laughed away. Recently, the media has reported on voices from the US calling on US and Chinese leaders to come to some agreement on how to define ‘national security’—a seemingly sensible suggestion to accommodate differences, but see what happened when the Party redefined ‘national security’ in Hong Kong. And what is next? Should they go on to seek agreement on how to define human rights, or even democracy? Ceding to the state the authority to define words is a treacherous path, but when China is playing that game, others may be sorely tempted to follow. There is still another way in which Party-speak slips in, namely through the logic of our own values. When the Chinese government proposes qualities like ‘peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom’ as ‘common values of humankind’, it is saying something very different from the liberal understanding, yet with a vocabulary and logic we cannot reasonably reject. Surely we do not deny that things like democracy and justice are important, shared values? So what does it matter if we call them ‘universal values’ or ‘common rules of human kind’? But of course it does matter: the concerted effort to replace ‘universal values’ with ‘common values’ is part of the same attempt to take away the power of articulating values from ordinary people, and putting it into the hands of the state. While there is no single authority on what is meant by ‘universal values’, the ‘common values of humankind’ are the Party’s property, and can be easily moulded to the Party’s liking, as with many seemingly benign formulations of the Party. When one adopts them out of courtesy or indifference, the Party gains another foothold in its war on meaning. As Party-speak gets increasingly mixed into international principles and rules, the danger is that the meaning of these principles itself becomes distorted and confused, losing any conceptual coherence and hence any ability to set standards, guide conduct, or communicate values. Just see how the so-called ‘One China Principle’, which attains almost universal agreement, can in fact mean almost anything depending on the speaker. Instead of signalling consensus, the dominance of such a ‘norm’ only prevents the clear articulation of genuine differences, which in turn compromise efforts to resolve them. Or how the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, the basis on which the UK agreed to hand over Hong Kong, is said to be more ‘accurately implemented’ even as it is being violated. The greatest threat to the current rules-based order lies not in the express renunciation of existing rules, but in their appropriation and subversion. The body of that rules-based order may live, but its soul could be lost. In highlighting how a rules-based order can fail us, I am of course not advocating that we give up on having rules altogether. Far from it. But I do say that we should drop the pretence that law is independent of politics, or that a lawyer can do his job just as well by turning a blind eye to the power dynamic in a society. Rather, how parties, witnesses, jurors, and judges interact is constantly affected by it. The letters of the law are but a skeleton; it is power that fills in the gap and animates them, not to mention writing them down in the first place. The law constrains power to certain extent but never determines its action, while on the other hand, power cannot take form and act on the world without the law. In that sense, all effective order—as opposed to disorder—must be rules-based, except perhaps the smallest unit where the will of the powerful can directly mediate everything. The key questions are not whether an order is rules-based, but what kind of rules it is based on, and what kind of power animates it. Is the law a skeleton for a human being or a shark? Is the resulting order a healthy one in harmony with itself, or a Frankenstein with a wing for an arm and an atrophied leg? But perhaps the Frankenstein is in fact a kind-hearted creature, while the physically healthy man is a ruthless murderer. If what we are after is a just order, we must also work on building a just distribution of power instead of just worshipping rules. Only when power is genuinely shared can laws be the shared expression of a community instead of the will of a few. Only when values hold greater power than force can laws function as a rational system of principles instead of a litany of brute commands. And only when laws faithfully express a community’s values can they gain the members’ respect and allegiance, instead of evoking fear and resentment. The questions of who and what has power in a society are intertwined. Values can have power only when power is fairly equally distributed among a people. For values are values only when backed by conscientious commitment, or else they are just window dressing for ulterior interests. Just see how communism has all but lied in ‘Communist China’ despite its prominence in official discourse. Since the voice of conscience can only come from within, and can be neither delegated nor centralized, conscience has power only when individuals have power. Law as values is, therefore, possible only when individuals have a share in state power, when each touched by the law can judge it and mould it in turn, in accordance with his own conscientious understanding of the law’s values. Law-as-values is not about rigid principles set in stone, but is itself a living conversation conducted on an egalitarian basis. As such, it must allow for uncertainty and contradiction, and does not guarantee success or lasting agreement. That order has nevertheless emerged out of such cacophony is the great miracle of the liberal experiment, and a testimony to the existence of universal values among humanity, which alone can anchor such a dynamic and pluralistic order. In contrast, when individuals are disempowered, dominated by the outsized power of the state machinery or factional interests, laws inevitably degenerate into an expression of force. For law-as-force does not require giving space to conscience or debates. Indeed, the grooming of obedient, unquestioning ‘soldiers’ is often the quicker way to amassing overwhelming power, which ensures the stability of the resulting ‘rules-based order’. With the rise of authoritarianism, what is at risk is not the existence of a rules-based order, but the authority of values in that order. A values-based order does not necessarily follow from a rules-based order, a distinction often overlooked by those who have always lived under a liberal order. Nor is the battle between law-as-values and law-as-force settled once and for all once important values are enshrined in foundational legal documents. Rather, laws as genuine statements of values are a rare and fragile achievement made possible only through hard-won democratization of power and sustained through the constant effort and vigilance of people committed to those values. In other words, it depends on whether we can keep the conversation on values alive and inclusive—which is where Hong Kong has failed. What has disappeared there is neither a rules-based order nor an ostensibly liberal constitution, but the guiding power of liberal values in the day-to-day working of that order. It is a fate that may befall more shall we fail to defend our values, head-on. We must put values back at the centre of our laws and our politics instead of dismissing them as a quaint preoccupation of idealists. Difficult and no doubt contentious debates on the content and implication of universal values cannot be sidestepped in order to placate dictators, appease demagogues, or secure material gains. This way lies the confirmation of the power of force over values, paving the path to their further erosion. In that sense, defending the rights of people everywhere is about far more than just helping others: it is at the heart of the battle to define ourselves and the order we have built. Are we truly a community of principles, or are we just as cynical as the dictator next door? Are we sincere about building a world order based on values, or are we happy with whatever kind of order so long as we are on the winning side? As far as inclusiveness is concerned, it is indisputable that the current international order is heavily dominated by the West, and thus still quite far from the ideal of law-as-values. But the way to improve it is not by giving more voice to the non-Western dictators, which would only deepen the silence of the voiceless. Rather, ordinary people must be empowered to join in the conversation on values through the building of democracy everywhere. Again, a difficult and not uncontroversial task, often decried as ‘interference’ when such efforts and solidarity are extended across border. Yet if we abandon the quest for democracy, we shall have no hope of ever building a just international order based on values. As lawyers, our trade is needed in any kind of rules-based order, good or bad, just or unjust. The dignity of our profession cannot, however, survive in just any kind of order. Instead, it is bounded up with the dignity of the law, with whether the law reflects our autonomy or denies it. The building of democratic institutions that alone can safeguard the law’s dignity is also the lawyer’s duty, which is why all three of us receiving this prize today are jailed for working for democracy in China, a fight that may seem unrelated to our profession but is in fact central to it. It is a fight we cannot waver from, even when knowing that the laws we served would likely condemn us. For sometimes confronting the law-as-it-is is the only way to respect the law-as-it-should-be—and the highest service a lawyer can offer her fellow men. Chow Hang-tung Born in Hong Kong in 1985, Chow Hang-tung is a barrister. She attended the candle light vigil every 4 June with her mother in her early childhood in commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. After secondary school she went on to read physics at Cambridge University. After completing her MA (Geo-physics) in around 2009 she joined an NGO campaigning for  China as well as international labour rights. Shortly afterwards she joined the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Democratic Movement in China ("the Hong Kong Alliance") as a volunteer and later became an executive member, subsequently vice-chairperson in 2016. In September 2021 she was arrested and has since been remanded in jail custody for charges under the China-initiated National Security Law, all related to her role in the Hong Kong Alliance, including one of conspiracy to subvert the state of the People's Republic of China. This speech was initially delivered at the CCBE Human Rights Award Ceremony on 24 November 2023. Patrick Poon presented the speech due to Chow Hang-tung's continuing imprisonment.

Soheila Sokhanvari is a British-Iranian artist whose diverse practice delves into the complexities of identity, politics, and social commentary. Drawing on her background as a former biochemist and her experiences as an immigrant to the UK at the age of 14, Sokhanvari’s journey as an artist has been shaped by her exploration of hybrid identities and the impact of her Iranian heritage. Her multimedia works, ranging from Iranian crude oil on paper drawings to traditional miniature paintings on calf vellum, reflect her fascination with storytelling, symbolism, and magic realism as tools for political expression. Sokhanvari’s recent exhibition, ‘Rebel Rebel’ pays homage to pre-revolutionary Iranian feminists, shedding light on the struggles and resilience of women in navigating patriarchal oppression. Through her art and activism, Sokhanvari continues to challenge societal norms and advocate for human rights, particularly in response to the ongoing injustices faced by women and minority groups in Iran. The Sheltering Sky (Soheila Sokhanvari 2015, egg tempera on vellum, 23.5 x 31 cm). © Soheila Sokhanvari CJLPA : Welcome, Soheila Sokhanvari. We would like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art . Your extensive body of work, including multimedia pieces and miniature paintings, delves into the contemporary political landscape, with a particular focus on pre-revolutionary Iran of 1979. By employing unconventional materials such as Iranian crude oil and calf vellum, you weave together narratives of collective trauma and individual experience, addressing themes of sacrifice, democracy, and societal consciousness. Through magic realism and symbolism, your art offers a nuanced commentary on political discourse, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of power and identity.   What drew you to art? I understand you were a scientist prior to becoming an artist. How did your journey as an artist progress?   Soheila Sokhanvari : My father was a fashion designer and fashion model in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also an amateur artist, so he taught me how to do miniature paintings, using egg tempera, how to see the world, how to look and to record that looking. As a child, I was always exposed to Persian miniatures through folklore books or reproductions of masters. My father used to tell me stories: by looking at one painting, he would tell me the story of the entire book. So, for me, miniatures have always been like book illustrations, and I always associated them with storytelling. Perhaps I wanted to be an artist because I have so many stories I want to tell. As a child, I was like any other child, I was always drawn to painting and drawing. But that feeling of wanting to paint and draw never actually left me, and that’s the difference between being an artist and not being an artist.   My father supported me through my teenage life, although he wasn’t physically with me because I came to this country alone. I arrived with my brother, but we were separated and went to different schools. I feel like art saved my life, because when I came to this country and had to endure being away from my family, I would draw them from photographs over and over again. For me, that made them come alive, so I could relive those moments again and again. It was therapeutic, cathartic for me to have painting and drawing. It truly saved me throughout my teenage and adult life.   Although I was a scientist, I was always painting and drawing in my spare time. I studied biochemistry and I became a cytogeneticist, which is the study of chromosomes. I worked for Cambridge University’s Department of Haematology until 2005, when I decided to take a leap of faith and pursue a postgraduate diploma at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. But even before that, from 2001 until 2005, I had studied art history and fine art part-time at Anglia Ruskin University. It was a balancing act, studying three days a week at university, working three days a week, and then on Sundays catching up with both my scientific reports and my coursework. It was like wearing two hats at once. After all, until the Victorian era artists were polymaths. They could be artists, mathematicians, alchemists, architects, astronomers, astrologers, engaged in various other professions at the same time.   I became an artist because my father was an artist, and it was always my dream to follow in his footsteps. However, I often felt like an imposter in the world of science, as if I was trespassing because deep down, I knew I was meant to be an artist. It was a difficult internal struggle. My mother never wanted me to become an artist, she always hoped I would pursue a career as a doctor or a lawyer. I had a mortgage, a child, responsibilities, and a husband who opposed my decision to become an artist. Family pressures weighed heavily on me. My mother even warned me that I would end up in a gutter if I pursued art, implying I would become homeless. It felt like a constant struggle, and I had to rebel against those expectations.   CJLPA : It must feel rewarding now that you’re fully immersed in your art and excelling at it.   SS : When I decided to leave my job, I was very desperate. I just couldn’t continue anymore. When faced with such a situation, the decision felt natural and organic. The decision was actually not that difficult, but it was difficult for everyone else to accept. Women are very tenacious and rebellious by nature. Particularly Iranian women, we are always swimming against the current.   When I decided to become an artist, I was happy to give up everything, to give up my good income for a lesser income, for a bit of peace of mind and a love of what I was doing. I wasn’t looking to become an acknowledged contemporary artist, my ambitions were quite small. I thought, what’s the worst that can happen? It was all about feeding your soul, being happy, being authentic, and following your dreams. To be happy is the most important thing in life, because that’s success. Success for me is not about money or fame. Success is about being happy in what you’re doing, getting up in the morning, and just doing what you love. Success will come to you, maybe if you’re lucky, if the planets line up. I’ve been very lucky, and I have to accept that fact.   CJLPA : Often children of immigrants have a hybrid identity and can feel stuck between two worlds, similar to you being between science and art. When you emigrated to the UK at the age of 14, what was your experience like? Is this hybrid identity something you relate to?   SS : Definitely. In 1978, Iran wasn’t that different from present-day Turkey. You had women walking around in miniskirts and shorts, as well as women completely veiled. Not so different from London. I experienced some cultural differences when I first came to this country, but on a larger scale there wasn’t much difference between England and Iran. When I first came here, I saw Muslim women wearing hijabs and non-Muslims living closely together. As an immigrant, whether you come alone or with your family, you become a collage of both cultures. You embrace the new culture but still hold onto your roots. It’s about finding a balance between the two. If you abandon your previous culture, you lose your family and history. If you cling solely to your old culture, you become an outsider. So, the best approach is to embrace the hybrid situation, becoming a collage of both cultures. Depending on the context, you adapt. Having lived most of my life in England, I’m often told I’m more English than others. But with my Iranian friends, I feel more connected to my Iranian roots. Being a hybrid means you don’t fully belong to either culture, which can make you feel like an outsider. But integrating and becoming a hybrid is important for immigrants. It adds richness to cultures and makes for interesting people.   Identities are fluid, I don’t just have one fixed identity. It can change from one day to the next, depending on the group of people I’m with. I came to this country at the age of 14 and enrolled in an all-girls school. I couldn’t speak much English, and being the only brown person in the school made me an outsider from the start. Not being able to speak the language further isolated me. I didn’t know what to talk to my classmates about because our experiences were so different. While they were discussing boys and fashion, I was preoccupied with the political turmoil in my home country. It felt like we had no common ground. Even in Iran, I felt like an outsider as a child. Among my siblings, I was always the one who preferred solitary activities like drawing and reading. So, I guess I was a loner, in a way. That doesn’t sound very flattering, but it’s true.   CJLPA : Your portraits feature a unique technique, painted on calf vellum with a squirrel brush, using the ancient method of egg tempera that you learned from your father. You’ve also mentioned the influence of Persian miniature paintings. Alongside your father, what specifically drew you to these techniques and styles?   SS : Persian miniature art dates back centuries and is related to miniature paintings in the Mughal and Chinese traditions. Portraiture, on the other hand, has always been a form of propaganda, with influential and powerful individuals using it to tell their stories and immortalize themselves. I’ve been drawn to portraiture since my arrival in England. My first encounter with art was at the National Gallery during a school visit, where I was overwhelmed by works like those of Rembrandt and Van Eyck. There’s something very human about connecting with another person’s face through art. I felt compelled to tell the stories of women who have become martyrs of the revolution in Iran, marginalized and oppressed by the patriarchal regime, their images banned, and their voices silenced. It felt important to me to give them a voice through my art. This story has been burning in my chest for 44 years. Painting portraits and miniatures felt like a natural choice for me, given my love for the Persian miniature tradition passed down from my father and my cultural heritage. I wanted to create contemporary art in England that combines traditional Persian miniatures with techniques like egg tempera on calf vellum, transforming them into modern illuminations. Ultimately, I wanted to do something that had never been done before. CJLPA : Similarly, your paintings combine Islamic patterns with the stylized aesthetics of the 60s and 70s. What was the motivation behind this form of hybridity?   SS : I think the women whose stories I tell were caught between the modernity pushed on them by the Pahlavi regime and their own traditional backgrounds, being from conservative, religious, and patriarchal families. They were chosen to represent the conflict between these two forces. That’s why I wanted to incorporate these patterns in my paintings, as a metaphor for the idea that these women had their roots in traditional Islamic culture, often represented by the background resembling Persian carpets, while being influenced by the modernity of the 60s and 70s, depicted through patterns reminiscent of pop culture wallpapers and clothing. These women were pulled by different forces—modernity and tradition.   Patterns are inherently political. This is something that may not be immediately apparent, as patterns are often used in branding. For example, the Gucci pattern conveys a certain level of wealth associated with the person wearing it. On the other hand, in Islamic culture, geometric patterns, because they appear to go on forever, are meant to represent the infinity and greatness of God and the vastness of the universe. For me, patterns are never innocent; they are always deeply political. Unfortunately, Westerners have lost this connection with the meaning of patterns. Patterns also reflect a specific era. You can look at a pattern and identify it as being from the 60s or the 70s, for example. I use these patterns to place my subjects in a specific time, a specific era, as a way of storytelling.   CJLPA : Your art serves as a powerful tool for political expression, from your paintings commenting on the global impact of crude oil to your passport series reflecting alternative identities. The ‘Rebel Rebel’ exhibition pays homage to the pre-revolutionary feminists of Iran, showcasing portraits of women involved in the arts who had to navigate modernity amidst an oppressive patriarchal tradition. How did you conceive of this concept and develop it into the exhibition we see today?   SS : In 1936, the Shah of Iran decreed that women, particularly those in the cities like Tehran, had to be unveiled. Until then, they were veiled, and their lives were heavily controlled. Just imagine how oppressed they were, being forced to walk on the left-hand side of the road and disguise their voices when talking to men they weren’t related to. The Shah’s decree changed the clothing for both men and women. Men had to give up their traditional clothing and wear Western clothes, while women had to be unveiled. I was interested in the idea that women, by force, have always been subject to whatever the government wants to impose, as they become a symbol of the government’s ideology. After the Iranian Revolution, women lost all the freedom they had gained through previous struggles. They lost their human rights, their legal rights, their identity, everything.   Initially, I wanted to tell this story using my mother and father as muses for my storytelling, utilizing my family portraits as a way of telling the history of Iranian women. I understood that the story of Iranian women, my family, and women artists is something that resonates deeply. In 1979, after the revolution, one of the first things destroyed was the entire film industry in Iran. They not only destroyed films but also the equipment. They arrested actors and actresses, forcing them to sign letters of repentance, promising to never appear on screen again. I wanted to tell the story of Iranian women from 1925 to 1979, all those who tried to navigate through patriarchy, misogyny, and oppression. It’s a story that’s not widely known but one which is crucial, especially in times when fascism is on the rise globally.   My platform was provided by Eleanor Nairne, a feminist curator who saw the importance of my work. She plucked me out of anonymity and gave me the opportunity to share this narrative. Before the Barbican exhibition [Rebel Rebel], I had a smaller exhibition based on these iconic women at my own gallery, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, in 2019. It was a step towards what I’m doing now, but on a smaller scale. The curator at the Barbican recognized the potential in my work and gave me an incredible opportunity to showcase it on a larger platform.   As an artist, I’ve always been political, always an activist, always speaking out on human rights, women’s rights. Even from childhood, I’ve always been a feminist, always addressing the plight of marginalized people. Before the Barbican exhibition, many people saw my paintings but never grasped how political my work was; they often saw my work as merely aesthetically pleasing without understanding the narratives embedded within. The Mahsa Amini protests taking place in 2022 at the same time as the exhibition provided context for my work, revealing what I was truly addressing. It was a bittersweet moment for me because it gave my work a global platform, but at the same time it saddened me deeply knowing people were being killed for protesting.   CJLPA : How did you decide which women to feature, and what was your experience like researching them?   SS : Researching these women was incredibly challenging, mainly because Iranian culture has not been particularly interested in documenting the biographies of its artists, especially female artists. In the past, women artists, such as dancers, were often derogatorily referred to as ‘raqqaseh’. People would attend their performances but showed no interest in knowing more about them.   Finding information about these women was nearly impossible. Many Wikipedia pages contained erroneous information, and the Iranian government actively removed or distorted information, tarnishing their reputations. However, I received a great deal of help from the curatorial assistant, Hilary Floe, who was amazing at researching for me. Another thing that greatly aided my research was the fact that some people from that era are still alive today. These women formed a close-knit group, as there were few of them in their respective fields, and maintained this bond even more tightly after the revolution, finding support and protection in one another. Through the connections of one person, I was able to contact many others. This network of friendship helped these women survive the pre-revolutionary era, the revolution itself, and the post-revolutionary period.   Another significant resource was the documentary film Razor’s Edge: The Legacy of Iranian Actresses  by Bahman Maghsoudlou. Maghsoudlou, a film critic, historian, artist, and filmmaker, spent 15 years creating this documentary, interviewing many of these women. Watching the film allowed me to hear these women speak about their lives and the challenges they faced in achieving their goals.   While my sources were limited, they were authentic. I was confident in the stories I was telling, knowing they were reliable. As for why I chose these women in particular, I was spoiled for choice, as there were many remarkable options, but I ultimately decided to focus on pioneers or women who were extremely famous and beloved by Iranian culture. I knew I could only paint a limited number of portraits.   CJLPA : Can you describe your daily painting routine and walk us through your portrait painting process?   SS : I would start by searching on Google for portraits of the women I wanted to paint. Depending on their fame, there would be either many portraits available or just one or two. For those with limited portraits, I would spend time staring at them. When you look at a photograph without taking your eyes off it for a long time, the image starts to come alive in your mind. It becomes like a frozen moment in a cinematic scene. I would see them as cinematic and capture them in my mind.   I would then create a collage by taking patterns from search engines, cutting them out, and placing them next to each other to see which patterns complemented or opposed each other. Next, I would draw the portrait on vellum using a pencil. With vellum, you have to know exactly what you’re going to do before you start because it doesn’t allow for changes easily. It’s a living support, the skin of an animal, so once you start, you can’t change your mind easily. This process is similar to miniature painting, where you design everything beforehand, and the only changes you can make are minor, such as colour adjustments. The actual painting process would take six to twelve weeks. I would grind the pigment, mix it with egg yolk, water, and five drops of white vinegar to create egg tempera, and then apply it using a miniature brush. It’s a slow technique, not fast or glamorous, but rather zen and methodical. Every shape in those paintings requires five layers of paint, so you can imagine how long it takes to complete one. By the time I finish a painting, I find myself falling in love with the person depicted. You develop a certain affection for them as you intimately know every curve and feature. You get to know them both biographically and biologically. So, these women become like friends to me. If I disliked or hated them, it would feel intolerable to paint them. Portrait painting, to me, is an act of love. It’s like expressing love through a visual medium.   CJLPA : Let’s discuss some of the women showcased in the exhibition. First up, we have Kobra Saeedi, a renowned dancer, actor, filmmaker, journalist, and poet. Could you share some insights into her and explain why she holds significance for you?   SS : Kobra Saeedi was an incredibly talented individual who hailed from a background of poverty and abuse, starved of love and food alike. Forced while still a student to perform in cabarets to raise money and support her family, she even financially assisted her siblings through their education, acting essentially as the head of the family. Following the revolution, she actively participated in protests against the compulsory hijab, aiming to document the events through film. However, her fame made her a target, leading to her arrest, torture via electric shocks, and confiscation of her assets. After her release, she found herself homeless on the streets of Tehran, a stark contrast to her previous stardom, as though Madonna were to become homeless. Kobra Saeedi is still alive, living in a shelter in Iran.   In my painting of her, I used two photographs as a reference, a headshot and a three-quarter-length photo, both very grainy and out of focus. I stared at the headshot for days until I could visualise her in that pose, taking a drag on a cigarette. I even recreated this image and had my husband photograph me, embodying her spirit. By lending her my body, I aimed to lend her a voice and depict her defiance against societal constraints, symbolized by her act of smoking, which was considered rebellious in Iran. Through her story, I sought to convey a message of resilience and empowerment, echoing Maya Angelou’s insistence that, despite everything, ‘still I rise’. Kobra (Portrait of Kobra Saeedi) (Soheila Sokhanvari 2022, egg tempera on calf vellum, 12.7 x 15.2 cm). © Soheila Sokhanvari CJLPA : Second, we have Roohangiz Saminejad, known for being first Iranian star in a talkie film: Lor Girl , released in 1933.   SS : Interestingly, the film had to be made in Mumbai (Bombay, as it was back then). Filming was undertaken in 1932, when women in Iran were not yet unveiled, so it was taboo for her to appear in public without her veil. That’s why it had to be filmed in India, which at the time had a much better film industry, with the know-how and all the equipment needed. When the film was released in Iran, Saminejad was both completely embraced by the public and faced outrage from a portion of Iranians who were appalled by her appearing without a veil and dancing. She went against every single prejudice in one go: she works at a tea house, falls in love with a government agent, rides on horseback, is chased by bandits, saves her lover from the bandits—she was a heroine! In a way, the director of that film gave her power; he was unknowingly a feminist, because he was talking about the plight of Iranian women.   She received death threats, not only from the people of her village but also from her own family. Despite the threats, being a rebel, she appeared in another film called Shirin and Farhad  (1934). After that, she had to change her name and live in anonymity because she was so hounded by men. She had to have three bodyguards, one of them being her driver, because of the number of people who wanted to harm her, who found the films outrageous. She feared for her life and said she had to give up the art she loved in order to save her life. The Lor Girl (Portrait of Roohangiz Saminejad) (Soheila Sokhanvari 2022, egg tempera on parchment, 12 x 15 cm). © Soheila Sokhanvari CJLPA : There is also Zinat Moadab. What is her significance?   SS : Zinat was the first woman who appeared in a talkie that was filmed in Iran: The Storm of Life , made in 1948. Not only this, in the film she criticizes the idea of arranged marriage, which was completely unacceptable for many Iranians. Her own family did not know she was going to appear in this film, so she filmed it in secret. When her family found out, they were shocked. Her distant cousin was so outraged that he wanted to carry out an honour killing, so he came after her, although she’d never met him before in her life. He was chasing her with a gun, while she was going from family to friends to family to friends’ houses, and even went into the jungle to hide and escape her family. Rebel (Portrait of Zinat Moadab) (Soheila Sokhanvari 2021, egg tempera on calf vellum, 13.5 x 19.5 cm). © Soheila Sokhanvari This episode demonstrates the split, the chasm in Iran at the time. The Shah was educated in Switzerland and came to Iran without really understanding his people. He wanted Iran to be modernized, but I think he couldn’t understand how people were thinking, and you can’t force people to modernize, you can’t push people in that direction. The more you push people, the more they resist, the more they hold on. They kind of draw the anchor, and just sit in their own opinion, and don’t shift. Iran, in my opinion, had always been ruled by two forces. There were the Mullahs, the conservative religious people, and the Shah. These forces were constantly pulling at the Iranian people from before the revolution. Some people became atheists, or they decided to practice Islam in their own terms, and made this leap towards westernization, while others anchored down their own ideologies even more. The chasm that grew in Iran was just massive, as epitomized by this chapter in Zinat’s life. Ultimately, she married a satirist and became an editor, also doing voiceovers for films.   CJLPA : I wanted to ask also about Fereshteh Janabi, who did the first depiction of sexual pleasure on screen in Iran.   SS :   Fereshteh Janabi was an amazing actress, incredibly talented. A lot of these films, I don’t like to call them pornographic, but they were certainly erotic. Many of the actresses who appeared in these films were abandoned afterwards by directors, who just used them once and then dumped them afterward, before finding a new person. But Fereshteh appeared in a lot of these films and made lots of more mainstream movies also. They were very heavy movies, they were very metaphorical, and the subject was not light. They deal with the idea of an Islamic man who’s attracted to this beautiful young woman, and he’s enticed and fighting his desires: a very controversial topic. As part of appearing in these films, Fereshteh even portrayed the first orgasm on cinema.   The Woman in the Mirror (Portrait of Fereshteh Janabi) 2021, egg tempera on calf vellum, 13.5 x 13.3 cm). © Soheila Sokhanvari After the revolution, she was not only threatened with arrest, but even given a death sentence, so she went on the run. She died after, I think, 19 or 20 years of hiding. Living in secret on people’s sofas for 20 years takes its toll, as does the fact that she was not allowed to pursue the career that she loved. She died at the age of fifty, very young, of a drug overdose, though nobody knows if this was suicide or not. If you see her films, you can see how talented she is. She’s very natural, a very good actress, and I think she was just born at the wrong time and wrong place, because if she was in any other country she would have won an Academy Award for her acting.   CJLPA : Finally, let’s discuss Forough Farrokhzad? She also seems to have often explored themes related to female desire in her poetry and films.   SS : Forough Farrokhzad was a great modernist poet and Iran’s first female documentary filmmaker. She hailed from a military background, with her father holding a high position in the army and exerting his authority at home. Since childhood, she had a passion for poetry and literature, and her brother was also talented at writing poetry. At the age of 16, she decided to marry a man who was 30, seeking an escape from her father and her household. Despite not being in love with him, she bore him a son. However, she became attracted to another man closer to her own age, who was also a writer and filmmaker: Ebrahim Golestan. Eventually, she engaged in an affair, facing ostracization as a consequence. Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (Portrait of Forough Farrokhzad) (Soheila Sokhanvari 2022, egg tempera on calf vellum, 13 x 15 cm). © Soheila Sokhanvari In 1958, she published a volume of poetry titled Osyan  ( Rebellion ). In one poem, ‘Divine Rebellion’, she imagined what she would do if she were God: to ‘let the sun loose in darkness’ metaphorically expressing a desire for enlightenment and liberation. Later:   weary of divine asceticism, at midnight in Satan's bed I would seek refuge in the downward slopes of a fresh sin. I would choose at the price of the golden crown of godhood, the dark and painful pleasure of sin’s embrace.   Can you imagine writing words like that, with such a candid expression of ‘sinful’ sexual desire, as a Muslim woman in such a repressive society? Even her fellow poets found such language totally unacceptable, and used to call her a harlot, the ‘scarlet lady’.   She died at the age of 32 in a tragic car accident. Her car slid on the snowy road as she tried to avoid colliding with the school bus. Unfortunately, she lost control and hit her head against the curb, resulting in her death. Her lover, Ebrahim Golestan, rushed to the scene and carried her to the nearest clinic, which happened to be just across the road from where they lived. However, the owner of the private clinic, a woman who disliked Farrokhzad’s poetry, refused to treat her. I cannot imagine a greater and more tragic insult, to refuse to treat someone for the words they have written. She died in the arms of her lover.   Some of these stories are deeply personal to me because I admire and love these women. As an artist, I can’t imagine how I would feel if someone prevented me from creating my art. My art is what gives me purpose and drives me every day. I’m fortunate to have the freedom to express myself through my art. If I were ever banned, censored, or oppressed, I don’t know how I would cope. It’s incredible how these women found the strength and resilience to keep fighting and living despite the obstacles they faced.   CJLPA : Why do you think art, especially women’s involvement in art, posed such a threat not only to the regime and the revolution, but also to the men of the time?   SS : I think conservative ideologies are dangerous, regardless of the culture or religion they stem from. Fascism and patriarchy often go hand in hand. In Iran, many men, though of course not all, traditionally view women, their voices and desires, as inherently sinful, so oppressing them is seen as a way to maintain purity. They might feel that by suppressing women they are preventing themselves from sinning. This mentality is deeply ingrained and can lead to victim-blaming. Men are fearful, and whenever you have the rise of feminism, you have an antagonistic rise of fascism. Whenever there’s a wave of feminism, I feel like there’s equal and opposite wave of fascism and patriarchy.   Nowadays, Generation Z is currently experiencing significant stress, but they are also proving to be a remarkably open-minded and socially conscious generation. Across the globe, Generation Z is known for their environmental awareness, liberalism, and strong feminist ideals. In Iran, something unprecedented is happening: men are standing in solidarity with women in protest for the first time in history. This unity is historic and has never occurred before.   CJLPA : You mentioned earlier the death of Jina Mahsa Amini and the 2022 protests in Iran, primarily led by women. Jina’s tragic death at the hands of the morality police, after being arrested not adhering to hijab regulations, sparked widespread protests, particularly among Kurdish Iranians. The timing of these events coincided with your exhibition, which already had political undertones in its rebellious foregrounding of Iranian women’s bodies. Can you elaborate on how this period personally impacted you as an artist and influenced your activism?   SS : As an artist I’ve always been political, and I’ve always considered myself quietly activist in my own way, though never overt. When I found out about Jina’s death, I was setting up the show, the space was being prepared for the exhibition. I was completely devastated because as a mother, Jina could have been my daughter. I couldn’t imagine how a mother must feel to lose their daughter in such a senseless, brutal act of violence. Afterwards, the protests started and Internet connections in Iran were blocked, so I was left in this silence and cut off from everybody. It was very difficult.   After three years of working hard on this exhibition, I was relieved that the show was coming together and was open to the public. I felt it was as I wanted it to be. I wasn’t sure how successful it was going to be, but I said to myself, ‘I’ve done the best that I can’, and I was happy with the work. But at the same time, these protests were happening in Iran, just two weeks after the murder of Jina. So it was very timely, a bittersweet opportunity which put my work into context. It was extremely emotional. During my interviews for the radio and newspapers, I was always on the verge of tears. I have been painting the stories of Iranian women for many years and talking about the plight of women. I’ve been an activist and an ally, and all of a sudden, I was becoming the public speaker for them. I was a reluctant public speaker because I doubted my abilities in that respect, feeling like I was really not trained and did not know how to express myself. I felt like my art was supposed to speak for me, so I could be hidden behind the paintings. Being pushed out of my studio into the public space, appearing on television and radio, being in newspapers, I felt exposed, but at the same time had to take on responsibility.   CJLPA : Could you share your thoughts on Jina Mahsa Amini’s impact, considering it sparked significant protests, with women burning their hijabs and cutting their hair as symbols of resistance? If you’re comfortable, perhaps you could shed some light on her story or what her family endured, offering insights into women’s treatment and life in Iran.   SS : There has been a media blackout regarding the protesters due to audience fatigue, which is quite disheartening. Many of the victims’ families have faced pressure from the Iranian government to remain silent. They even attempted to claim that Jina suffered a heart attack and brain injuries, which her family courageously refuted. Jina, a Kurdish girl, had to adopt the Iranian name Mahsa due to the oppression of Kurdish identities in Iran. She was a courageous young woman who was arrested outside a Tehran underground station by the morality police for a perceived minor infraction related to her hijab. Three days later, she died in hospital, suspected of having been beaten by the police.   The entire population came to the streets was because everybody could relate to Jina. She could have been your daughter, she could have been your sister, she could have been your friend. And because she was so innocent, she wasn’t politically active, she was just a little girl, a young student who came to Tehran and was killed because of something as mindless as her hair showing a little bit more than it supposedly should have been. The Iranian government and morality police reacted brutally to the uprising and shot at peaceful protesters with live bullets, arresting thousands of people, with over 500 deaths. The cutting of hair relates to the fact that historically and culturally, Iranian people cut their hair before going to war. So the act was a statement of war, but also mourning and empowerment, taking autonomy of one’s body and showing an angry disregard for the repressive beauty standards of the regime.   CJLPA : Absolutely. Do you have any final words for our readers?   SS : I would just stress the importance of talking about these interlinked topics: human rights, environmental rights, animal rights, and so on. I think we should all be activists, we should all be activists in our way, and we should all be educating and enlightening our neighbour, so that the light can burn out the darkness. Yeah. As Forough Farrokhzad said, if I were God I would take the sun into the darkness. As an artist, I think that’s my responsibility, to be the sun in the darkness.   CJLPA : Many thanks indeed for your time and insights. This interview was conducted by Nancy Lura. As a final year Film and Literature student at Warwick University, Nancy combines her passion for the creative arts with a keen interest in pursuing a career in the film industry. Alongside this, she advocates for human rights and believes strongly in the transformative power of the arts in driving social progress.