Notes on Hegemony

Our Editors-in-Chief, Lucy McCulloch, Jude Jones and Einav Grushka provide their musings on our theme

Lucy McCulloch

 Maybe it is a circumstance of my own good fortune that ‘Hegemony’ to me brings to mind structures and security. I think of networks of power and empowerment I have in my life and how it mainly centres around those I love. After an argument with my parents over Christmas, we were apologising - Mum explained that she and Dad would be the only constants in my life, for a long time at least. And she didn’t mean it in a way to say I’m not finding anything or anyone else, but that unconditionally they and my brother are the structures that will hold. When I chose ‘hegemony’ as the theme my mind went to politics but then flitted back to this more positive recognition of power, and the authority of affection. Hence chucking Bruce Springsteen in a collage aside Vladimir Putin to publicise this venture.

It is a cliché, but I do genuinely feel that all I understand about true love has come from my closest girlfriends. The glittering cobweb of power constructed around us and by us to protect us and each other. When I need comfort, I go to them; when I need to be told to grow a pair or that I am being unreasonable, I still go to them. Just as they come to me. This power is what is upheld, by all of us, and so hegemony falls closest to home in those we trust with authority and those who trust us with power.

 Hegemony can be destruction and construction simultaneously – we can’t take one without the other, and we shouldn’t. But, from my experience I trust what I love and hold to my breast, and that isn’t often politicians.

Jude Jones

To me, hegemony is about dominance. Of an idea, a belief; of an ideal. It is thus an effect of the imaginary: for something to be hegemonic, it must manifest repeatedly in our conscience and do so without relent, so that it becomes all that we see, all that we think. This, of course, is not some minor neurosis. Such psychic hegemony often has real-world causes, and it would be naïve to insist that a hegemony of the mind never first comes without a hegemony of the body. No matter how you want to define that ephemeral utterance, “body.” However, hegemony enacts itself most where we cannot see it, inside the mind, and that where its effects are most felt.

By detour, then, hegemony also represents to me a chance at self-liberation. I am reminded of American-Vietnamese author Ocean Vuong’s insistence that ‘being queer saved my life,’ because ‘when I look at my life, I [see] that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes.’ Or bell hooks, who defined ‘queer not as being about who you are having sex with […] but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.’ Creative self-definition, creative self-remaking must be enacted against a dominant and hegemonic ideal, since creativity can only exist as anathema to the drudgery of the hegemonic. And there is something queer to that. To any identity beyond the hegemon, which must constantly find ways to create itself. Hegemony proliferates creativity, and creativity births from itself new worlds.

Einav Grushka

‘Hegemony’. Four syllables that seem so abstract, so open and so vague when first sounding them. So I say the word once more, slower. Initially, the notion of hegemony brings to mind structures of socio-political power, of domination, overpowering and overbearing. It conjures up visions of states, empires, wars and divisions across vast histories and landscapes. But, away with the macro. Let’s zoom in. What can hegemony mean for me, in my own life? What can it reveal on the micro-level? 

When I first began studying at Cambridge in 2020, my own persona was strictly split in two. I had my Cambridge half – the studious half, living in an isolated academic bubble, slowly developing a knack for academic jargon. And, I had my home half – my Israeli half, a half that still, few people understand. It is the half that encompasses my upbringing, my language, my blunt sense of humour, my taste in music and even my hyperbolic aversion to the cold. Back then, the two halves rarely convened. However, over the past four years, splitting my time between Cambridge and Tel Aviv, I’ve noticed a shift, an internal power struggle if you may. Whether through the strengthening of the gravitational pull I feel drawing me back home every break, or through the realisation that my Hebrew has started to seep more and more into my English, slowly dominating it, it is clear that an internal fight is brewing. The two halves were never equal to begin with. I realise that hegemony is within as it is without. It is the fight of identity and self-identity, and also a struggle for identity and importantly, for belonging. When you view identity as a composite patchwork, you’ll always hear a battle cry. It’s the cry for dominance, accompanied by the clash of personal histories, beliefs, cultures and language. 

So, when I think of hegemonic struggles, before plaguing myself with identifying and solving the political structures that constrict humanity both nationally and internationally, I search for them within myself. Where do I belong? Where am I welcome? Where can I be myself? What pulls me in each direction and why? Hegemony leads me to ask: How do we grow into ourselves, and what is overcome along the way?

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