Communities of Resistance and Prefigurative Politics

This study contends that resisting oppression requires participating in a community of resistance whose counter-practices abolish unjust social arrangements and engages in alternative world-making; prefiguring alternative futures and more just societies.

The first section lays out an account of protest as a communicative mechanism for the creation of communities of resistance that makes it possible to break silences and overcome communicative and epistemic injustices that exist under conditions of oppression. Building on that account, section two elucidates the subversive potential of the counter-cultures and resistant imaginations developed by communities of resistance. In particular, that communal practices of resistance should be understood as prefiguration or the performative anticipation of social change. Connecting queer theory and queer activism with the neo-Marxist literature on prefiguration and counter-communities, the text conceptualizes resistance acts as performative mechanisms of prefigurative politics, showing how protest actions enable resistors to anticipate in their actions the social world that they want to bring about. Finally, drawing from women of color feminist scholarship, section three examines how resistant imaginations function in protest actions both (a) as a way of opposing injustices, and (b) as a way of transforming the world and transforming ourselves through alternative world-making (world-disclosure or prefiguration). Upon this view of prefigurative politics, resistant imaginations become embodied and alive in the subversive practices of communities of resistance that performatively prefigure the possibility of a world without injustice.

Dr. José Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, with affiliations in African American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Spanish and Portuguese Department. His primary fields of expertise are critical philosophy of race, feminist and queer theory, social epistemology, and political philosophy.

Medina has published five monographs, five edited (or co-edited) volumes, and over seventy articles and book chapters. His latest book, The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance, came out with Oxford University Press in 2023. His previous book, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford University Press, 2013), was the book award recipient of the North-American Society for Social Philosophy. Current projects on theories of oppression and resistance include the collection of essays Resistance for Oxford University Press.