Natalie Oswin
Department of Geography, McGill University
natalie.oswin@mcgill.ca

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC on Thursday 27 September 2018. Commentaries on this event are already so numerous they could fill multiple volumes. This is not surprising. The stakes were incredibly high. The drive to fill a Supreme Court seat with a partisan, conservative white man was high on the how-to-slide-the-US-into-authoritarianism to do list. The lives, livelihoods, and bodily autonomy of women, people of colour, Indigenous people, migrants, trans people, queers, differently abled people – in other words, anyone not aligned with the white male supremacist end game of the current Republican administration (which is not to say that only or all “whites” and “males” are aligned with this project – think “homonationalism”, “model minorities”, “post-feminism”…) – hang in the balance.

I write this commentary to add to critical discourse at this historical conjuncture…