Consumer Culture Vulture

The current focus of the political religious and right with gender identity is driven by deep seated personal inadequacy. Existentialist philosophy offers an excoriating analysis of why this obsession arises.     In his brilliant 1944 critique of nationalist racism, ‘ the Anti-Semite and the Jew ’, Jean Paul Sartre sought to understand why so many of his countrymen collaborated with Fascism. Revisiting this essay by the French philosopher, alongside his wider writing on existentialism, helps to contextualise and interpret current transphobia. Sartre realised that anti-Semitism is different from, say, anti-black racism, in that a Jew can potentially ‘pass’ as non-Jewish. Jewishness, unlike blackness, is permissible when and because it can be hidden. This leads to a dichotomous situation. On the one hand ‘good’ Jews are those who supress their identity publically. This is as opposed to those ‘bad’ ones who do not blend in with normative demands. Jews are p...