Caleb Ward
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calebw.bsky.social
Caleb Ward
@calebw.bsky.social
3.5K followers 1.2K following 2.9K posts
Social and political philosophy, feminism and social change, almost done with a book on the philosophy of Audre Lorde

Postdoc at Uni Hamburg
Photo by Frank Ward, 1999
https://www.calebward.xyz/
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calebw.bsky.social
"People aren't just hot for revolution because they eroticize change. People are hot for revolution because change is the condition of possibility for regaining agency over their sexual & erotic lives, which have been exploited & usurped by a hostile society."

I'm gonna finish this chapter today!
Hot for Revolution using Mamdani sign generator
November 10, 2025 at 12:28 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Here’s some important news I learned from @shamjaff.bsky.social’s global newsletter today: Australia secretively shipping people for indefinite detention in Nauru

This world sucks sometimes, but this newsletter is great, and you should sign up for it.
Australia is potentially deporting hundreds of people to an island five hours away What happened Australia has started deporting people it calls “non-citizens” to Nauru, a tiny Pacific island nation. These are mostly long-term residents who lost their Australian visas after criminal convictions but couldn’t be sent back to their home countries because it wasn’t safe. The move follows a new US$1.62 billion deal between Australia and Nauru, lasting 30 years, that allows Australia to “relocate” hundreds of people there. At least three men have already been flown out, and several others are being held for removal. What's the reaction been? There's been a lot of criticism. What's the difference? Ian Rintoul (Refugee Action Coalition) called it “replacing indefinite detention in Australia with indefinite detention on Nauru.” Who's accountable for this? Ogy Simic (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre) said the deportations are happening “under a veil of secrecy,” with no transparency or accountability. Are they OK? Will they be OK? Sarah Dale (Refugee Advice and Casework Service) said people are being sent away “without knowing if they had legal advice, health checks, or even due process.” Not much public information on the deal The biggest criticism is that the process is secretive and opaque.
November 10, 2025 at 9:57 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Just want to note that closed captioning on zoom writes “herbivore” for “de Beauvoir”
Herbivores work more thoroughly incorporated and reflected the historical experiences of minority women and men. Its impact could have been more profound for these groups.
November 7, 2025 at 7:44 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Thoughts on "rigorous" philosophy:

I'm back at the 6th Roundtable for Black Feminist & Womanist Theory, listening to Bailey Thomas introduce the event as "a space grounded not in hierarchy, but in care, collaboration, & rigor."

Time's ripe to reclaim "rigor" as a demand we make of philosophy 1/
Screen grab from the 2026 Roundtable for Black Feminist and Womanist Theory with Bailey Thomas introducing the event
November 6, 2025 at 3:31 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Looks like Marie Kondo is a good place to start
AI Overview in response to "how do i become a hermit": To become a hermit, you must create a lifestyle of solitude, which involves physically distancing yourself from society, minimizing your reliance on others, and adapting to a self-sufficient existence. This can be a gradual process, involving simplifying your life by decluttering and reducing your wants, or a more drastic change of moving to a remote location
November 6, 2025 at 10:38 AM
calebw.bsky.social
This is gonna be fun. APA symposium on my master‘s tools paper!
EB To: Derek, Caleb & 3 more... › Symposium: Audre Lorde on Social Change Dear Panelists, Thanks for your participation in the upcoming symposium for the pacific APA! The schedule for the man program is currently being finalized.
November 6, 2025 at 10:30 AM
calebw.bsky.social
This snippet from a French news story perfectly highlights the automatism of the criminal justice system:

Damaging your cell door is prosecuted as a crime, but police can legally smash down your door & shoot your dog while executing a warrant, even if they find nothing.
The suspect had been initially scheduled to stand trial on Wednesday on minor charges of breaking a mirror and damaging the door of the prison cell where he was detained in 2019 as part of a separate theft investigation, which later cleared him, Associated Press reported.
November 6, 2025 at 8:45 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Have any feminists out there read Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish anarchist freedom fighter? I knew Rojava in Syria was supposedly a feminist state, but actually reading Öcalan is wild... he's straight up a radical feminist.

"Masculinity must be killed"😮 👇
As can be seen even from this short argumentation, man is a system. The male has become a state and turned this into the dominant culture. Class and sexual oppression develop together; masculinity has generated ruling gender, ruling class, and ruling state. When man is analysed in this context, it is clear that masculinity must be killed. Indeed, to kill the dominant man is the fundamental principle of socialism. This is what killing power means: to kill the one-sided domination, the inequality and intolerance. Moreover, it is to kill fascism, dictatorship and despotism. \Ve should broaden this concept to include all these aspects. Liberating life is impossible without a radical woman's revolution which would change man's mentality and life. If we are unable to make peace between man and life and life and woman, happiness is but a vain hope.
November 5, 2025 at 3:09 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Lorde concludes: "That's true of the city. I think that's true about anything that is both onerous & vital. I see the city as those two polarities. Very much, very much."

I want us to watch NYC spark those polarities again, show the places of both our power & strain! Very much. Very much. 🌩️
Audre Lorde photo portrait by Lynda Koolish 1978
November 4, 2025 at 10:21 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Lorde's 1974 book New York Head Shop & Museum has some of the most powerful NYC poems I've read, including amazing jeremiads like "Cables to Rage"👇
From "Cables to Rage or I've Been Talking on the Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time" by Audre Lorde I have been given other doses of truth— that particular form of annihilation— shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city but oh that captain marvel glance brushing up against my skull like a steel bar in passing and my heart withered sheets in the gutter passing passing booted feet and bus drivers and old yentes in Brighton Beach kitchens SHIT! said the king and the whole court strained passing me out as an ill-tempered wind lashing around the corner of 125th Street and Lenox.
November 4, 2025 at 10:21 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Hi NYC👋 I think about you so much, imagining Audre Lorde in Harlem & Staten while my grandparents & then my mom carved out life in the Bronx in the 30s–60s.

Here's to New York City and what Lorde calls its "doses of truth—that particular form of annihilation" that is NYC's regional delicacy. 🍎
...
The New York Head Shop and Museum (1974) was Audre Lorde's fourth book of poems and is full of fire
November 4, 2025 at 10:21 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Basically I'm trying to win the trust of the reader that I won't waste your time with "This makes me think of this other text that you probably haven't read, but I have." We'll see if it works.

I give a lot of long Lorde quotes in the notes from hard to find sources, and also analysis like these 👇
79. Note that Lorde’s account of survival here appears somewhat in tension with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s much-cited definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, 28). Looking beyond physical life or death as the bottom line, Lorde writes that Black people in America “were never meant to survive,” with the key proviso: “not as human beings” (SO 42). 35. SO 39. Lorde’s repeated statement, “There are no new ideas,” echoes William Carlos Williams’s famous repeated line 50 years before, “No ideas but in things,” which became a mantra for 20th-century poetry (2023 [1927], 6, 9). Williams’s statement in turn echoes Edmund Husserl’s 1901 rallying cry for phenomenology: “We must go back to the ‘things themselves’” (2001 [1901], 168). Lorde’s commitment to a poetry of the particular rather than abstractions aligns her squarely with Williams (and to a lesser extent Husserl), although it is not clear whether she saw Williams’s work in general as an influence on her own. However, whether or not she read Williams seriously, she almost certainly read a brief 1972 essay by feminist anti-war poet Denise Levertov, “The Poet in the World,” which invoked Williams’s words in support of a “fruitful reciprocity between poetry and [political] action” (Levertov 1972, 18).
November 3, 2025 at 1:55 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Gonna use this formatting, even if it means OUP bans me for life
screen grab from page 2 of Derrida's "Glas" (published by University of Nebraska Press)
November 3, 2025 at 1:30 PM
calebw.bsky.social
This is literally the SS page in the 1940 NSDAP party handbook. If I may hammer home my point: the book includes hundreds of pages of costume guidelines for all levels of society, and then 10 pages at the end with blood quantum rules, including laws for intermarriage among "Mischlinge"
screenshot of Bovino appearing on Fox News in his get-up SS "traditional uniform" in NSDAP Organisationsbuch 1940, flipped horizontally for visual effect
October 31, 2025 at 1:23 PM
calebw.bsky.social
A fantastic show last night, had me tipping my head back in meditation & reconsidering many of my life priorities.

I realized I saw these two in Philly in 2005 too… here’s the 2025 version
October 31, 2025 at 11:28 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Remember folks, there’s no difference between cosplaying as a fascist and being a fascist. Cosplaying is essential to fascism
Gregory Bovino appearing in Fox News in late October 2025 Heinrich Himmler
October 31, 2025 at 10:46 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Trying to create a new outlook is cool and good, but Lorde’s word is “dismantle” when it comes to the master’s house. Does a fresh outlook dismantle? Does “making a statement” dismantle? These are important questions! We need to be asking them constantly!
The paper adds to the existing literature by exploring Zilberman’s subversive approach to challenging negative perceptions of aging and beauty culture, and forming a new outlook on age and time, in a manner that uses existing “tools” in a new way. This suggests not only that it is possible to use the “tools” of an existing mindset to bestow new meanings but also raises the question of whether the Master’s tools become our own when we appropriate, reuse, and convert them to make a feminist statement. Additionally, the question remains as to who can utilize these “tools” and to what extent marginalized identities might be as effective in bringing about change from within the system itself.
October 29, 2025 at 10:32 PM
calebw.bsky.social
🫠🫠

This feminist jewelry sounds cool, but let’s stop using Lorde’s words as a hook to hang our academic bathrobes on.
Article Open access Published: 27 October 2025 Dismantling the master’s house with his own tools: the Wrinkles Jewelry Collection’s defiance of visual agism Shlomit Aharoni Lir & Liat Ayalon Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 1639 (2025) Cite this article 219 Accesses Metrics details Abstract The prevailing antiaging beauty industry equates beauty and attractiveness with youth, especially in the case of women.
October 29, 2025 at 10:24 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Here’s an example of something interesting and important I learned today from @shamjaff.bsky.social. A link to her free weekly newsletter of underreported stories is in her profile. 📰
Africa Malawi wants to keep more of its resource wealth within the country What happened Malawi just banned the export of raw minerals. The government wants foreign companies to stop digging up its resources and shipping them out for processing elsewhere. Instead, it’s saying: if you want Malawi’s minerals, process them here. Create jobs here.
October 27, 2025 at 4:28 PM
calebw.bsky.social
This book is a key contribution for developing this direction. I love how lesbian feminists like Lorde and Adrienne Rich laid the groundwork for so many movements!

Keep 👀 on work coming out of the new Aro/Ace Research Network based at Leeds (organized with @lukebrunning.bsky.social among others)
Cover of Ela Przybylo - Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality
October 24, 2025 at 3:22 PM
calebw.bsky.social
I'm all lined up to discuss my "Hot for Revolution" paper at this great works-in-progress series that Myisha Cherry and Francisco Gallegos curate... now I just need the fortitude and creativity to write the paper 🤦
Emotion & Society Lab WIP (Work in Progress) Series flyer for Fall and Spring 2025-26. Listed for December is Caleb Ward: Sexual Desire and Political Agency
October 23, 2025 at 4:58 PM
calebw.bsky.social
I talked this past weekend about Audre Lorde and the necessity of inventing new patterns of relating that disrupt assumptions of hierarchy across our differences

This session was also about how to engage Black feminist/radical theoretical work without flattening it
Me standing in front of an audience at the podium, with a slide in the foreground showing a photo of a 1973 gathering of Black women writers with the header “A Basic and Radical Alteration of Assumptions”
October 21, 2025 at 1:00 PM
calebw.bsky.social
This “Smiling Lessons” paper goes extremely hard. This is how it starts 🗡️

“She had been warned. So she shouldn’ been surprised when I cut her. I cut her across her face. I taught her to smile.”
When I was about 12, my grandmother told me a story about her time as a girl-child in the american South. She and her family were sharecroppers—or, in her words, “slaves in the country”—in Humbolt, TN. One day, when she and her younger brother, Bud, were working a plot of land a girl, “poor, white, mean, and ugly; ugly to the bone, Undra” started harassing Bud; threatening Bud for looking at her. This went on for about a week and Grandma, back when she was known as “Ella Mae,” had had her fill. “I went up to her, Undra, real quiet, real close, and looked her straight in the eye and tol’ her to cut it out. Or else. And she had the nerve to laugh, nasty mean little dirty thing that she was could laugh wi’out smilin’. And she said, ‘O yeah? Or else wut, gaaaal? So, the next day, here she come, tryin’ mess with My Buddy. And she had been warned. So she shouldn’ been surprised when I cut her. I cut her across her face. I taught her to smile.” That night, the Klan came to Ella Mae’s house. Telling me this my grandmother shrugged, “The important thing is that little girl never messed with My Buddy again. Now come on and holp me with these tomatahs.”
October 16, 2025 at 8:52 AM
calebw.bsky.social
I’m on this panel at FEAST tomorrow too. I’m presenting on Lorde inventing “new models for relating,” and then we’ll have a workshop about how to engage with “classic” Black feminist thinkers without domesticating them
Panel: A Basic and Radical Alteration of Assumptions (Black Feminism) Caleb Ward, University of Hamburg; Andrea Warmack, Ursinus College; Naomi Simmons-Thorne, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign This panel/workshop presents three papers in sequence: two grappling with inheritance from “classic” figures in 20th-century Black feminism and a third posing methodological questions that will become the basis for discussion. The first two papers deal with inheritance from Lorraine Hansberry and Audre Lorde, showing their resources for reaching beyond the pitfalls of what Lorde calls “old blueprints of expectation and response” that define relationships in the status quo. Lorde and Hansberry put into question models of mastery, belonging, and justice that lock communities and relationships within dynamics of domination. These canonical texts, however, are often ambivalent, and the process of canonization has had an especially flattening effect in the history of academic appropriation of Black feminism. The third paper examines how a living, politically grounded self-critique can continue to be supported within Black feminist discourse, to keep these visionary resources alive and in question. The discussion period is meant to invite reflection on the substance of these Black feminist interventions and the political and methodological questions raised—and to invite audience members to apply the same scrutiny to the other discourses in which they participate.
October 15, 2025 at 9:44 PM
calebw.bsky.social
And the award for most egregious misreading of Lorde’s master’s tools goes to whoever wrote this. Just a total hallucination in the pre-AI era
October 11, 2025 at 12:16 PM