When I think about modernity — what it means and why it’s important to understand — I think of the questions I ask my students at the beginning of every term: how have we arrived at the particular cultural moment in which we’re now living? What has made this moment possible, and why?​

This question is useful in the Feminist Theory classes I teach because we are living in such a unique time for feminist thought. Tracing the genealogy of feminism over the years helps both my students and I understand the current cultural climate in Canada, affected as it is by the Me Too and Times Up movements, mobilizations against rape culture and sexual violence, and conversations about identity and sexual freedom.

The questions of how and why relate to the study of modernity itself. How did we arrive at this particular political moment, for instance, with all its contradictions intact? Refugee crises, climate change, sweeping authoritarianism, the hope of Left populism, and incremental changes of all kinds seem to coexist and create a political reality that at once feels utopian and dystopian, hopeful and despairing.

The truth of these political contradictions ultimately orients me to an understanding of modernity that I have found helpful in both my intellectual and personal lives. Indeed, when I ask my students to think through how and why we’ve ended up where we have as a culture, I always end up asking myself how I have ended up where I am. What has happened to make my life — as it is now — possible?

While many of our current conversations about identity focus on that which limits our lives — race and gender, for example — thinking through what enables life seems equally, if not more, important. I’m a South Asian woman and an academic; I have family and friends and a partner who live all over the world and whom I see regularly. I’m queer and live what we might consider a particular kind of ‘queer’ life, one in which I can remain unmarried, without many family restrictions, and focus almost solely on my academic and interior life.

I find it tempting to attribute this kind of life to a form of modernity, but to do so would be dishonest. After all, to live as I do is possible only because the same life is not possible for others. Every time I get on a plane to see my parents or my friends or my partner, I’m reminded that my life is not (as yet) devastated by the crises of climate change, that I can instead participate in the creation of these crises with impunity. If I benefit professionally and financially from entrance as a brown woman into the academic world, that entrance is made possible by the women who work as cleaners and cafeteria workers, whose contributions to the life of the university are valued much less than mine.

What we might consider to be modernity lies in these contradictions. As life becomes easier and more efficient for me, so too does it become more difficult and precarious for others. In thinking through the conditions of modernity with my students and in my own work, I hope to always remain committed to the struggles against the many injustices of these conditions themselves.

Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)