by Grace Kyungwon Hong
Property
“Property” references not only the objects that are owned, as in common usage, but the social system in which the right and ability to own are the bases of the state and civil society. In such a system, property is the fundamental right that guarantees all other rights, in that the property-owning citizen—what political theorist C. B. Macpherson (1962) called the “possessive individual”—is the only recognizable subject of the state. Property is commonly assumed to be a universally protected right, and the modern nation-state is predicated on the notion that all citizens have equal protection of their property. Yet such an assumption erases the violent, ongoing transformation of lands, social relations, and persons into property in settler-colonial societies. In such a context, the protection of the right to possess for some is the foundational violence that underwrites and enables dispossession for others within the system of property relations.
Capital
In elucidating the concept of capital as a keyword of gender, I contend that modern conceptions of gender developed historically out of the emergence of capitalism as a settler colonial, colonial, and racializing regime. Such a regime not only underwrites the modes of accumulation and extraction upon which capitalism depends, but its epistemes also situate racialized and colonized peoples and cultures as the limit or the outside to the modern definition of the human in order to legitimate and naturalize the conditions for accumulation and extraction. Current normative understandings of gender, which structure roles, embodiments, and institutions, are based on this definition of the human, figured as the individuated subject of property for which the corresponding organization of social space is separate and differently gendered public and private spheres. The propertied subject, or “possessive individual,” and separate-spheres institutions, while mystified within western liberal capitalist ideologies as natural, universal, and ahistorical, are in fact historically specific, socially constructed, and unevenly available. Thus, understanding the emergence and development of capital requires a structural understanding of how political, economic, and cultural institutions normalize certain ways of knowing, being, and relating to others while making others deviant, criminal, or incomprehensible. Yet this process is never complete or totalizing, meaning that racialized, colonial, queer, sexualized, and gender nonnormative formations are constantly enacting alternative modes of relationality.