Situated Civility: Anna Julia Cooper and Hannah Gadsby on Politeness and Public-Mindedness

Abstract

In public life, the problem of civility is often presented as a choice over whether citizens should recover social norms of civility to sustain politics in the face of polarization or else contest demands for civility to politicise social inequalities. Political theorists often respond by treating this as an epistemological problem requiring conceptual clarification. By distinguishing between civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness, for instance, they promise to clarify when it is appropriate to conform to social norms and when it might be morally permissible to be rude or disrespectful. While valid in its own terms, such an approach presupposes an impoverished conception of both the subject and the politics of civility. Rather than ask when and why we should choose to be civil (or not), in this article we ask: what is produced when citizens are civil or uncivil within a given situation? We consider this by turning to two feminist interlocutors: Anna Julia Cooper and Hannah Gadsby. Engaging with their reflections on and interventions within situations in which civility rises to the level of explicit attention provides the basis for a more adequate understanding of the subject of civility. Cooper and Gadsby each highlight how the subject does not simply choose whether to conform to social norms but is both constituted by the situation within which they act while also constituting the situation of which they are a part. Tthis opens the way to a more adequate understanding of the politics of civility. As an embodied negotiation of social norms and political principles, Cooper and Gadsby show how this involves reading situations, expanding situations to interpellate others, and disclosing the limits of a situation.