My “Christmases” taught me there was no one Truth, and that just because you weren’t religious, that didn’t mean you weren’t impacted by culture and tradition and faith. They got me thinking about cultural collision and being of two nations, two worlds, two religions, no religion. They gave me an experience of utter alienation and isolation and un-belonging. But they also gave me the ability to empathize with and occupy multiple viewpoints at the same time.
One reason I am invested in ideology critique, and in sharing what ideology critique “is” and how it works, is that ideologies such as patriarchy and white supremacy live in our bodies as much as our thoughts, and learning to see and combat their power is a deep form of personal and collective liberation.
When I read Hough’s piece, I hear her describing how ideology is registered in the body and forms the engine of our self conception. Ideologies are braided together with the specifics of our lived experience. They are not merely concepts; they are not merely expressions of culture; they are the screens through which our embodied experiences and our feelings are made sense of and expressed in words. They shape our belonging and alienation, our shame and exile, our pride and resistance.
What ideology critique gives us is a method to fight oppression and refuse shame. It gives us a way of noticing and talking about how ideologies work to craft and shape what counts as normal, and who is worthy enough to stay alive and unmolested, in both senses of the term.
It takes us out of individual questions of how we feel, and what happened to us, and what we think is our fault, and shifts our focus to the larger systems and structures that shape the acts of violence that are landing on the people we love. It shines a light on the systems, so we can see them, challenge them, break them, and usher in something new.
