Hannah Ashley

Diagnosis: “Superpower Suicide” is Only Step 1

But we need transition to reimagine the collective subject

Hannah Ashley

May 09, 2026

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Timothy Snyder in your latest “Superpower Suicide”—diagnosis 100%. My view is that the cult Snyder references was made possible by ideological paradox propagated (=propaganda) by liberal establishment, fried the brains and killed the spirits of so many, made them/us into conspiracy theorists—how else to explain how alone, confused and unhappy we all feel? The medicine: a “reconsideration of American ideals”? With so much respect: no. (Snyder knows far better than I how much work “reconsideration” is doing in that shorthand.) We must short term win at all costs and play all the dirties, but long term we must play the decades-long game that the authoritarians did and reimagine the collective subject.

We as humans “take place” argues Sylvia Wynter. But we must teach ourselves to transition into beings that “take place;” not human beings, but humans being. We can make ourselves into beings who love conflict, solidarity, rupture, and ordinariness. These are ways of being that community organizing teaches. We must be “auto-poetic” (self-making) as a species. (Interested in some first ideas on how to and more on why? Check out my—and colleagues’—ongoing project re communityorganizinghumanities.com).

Here is a student take, a business management student by the way: “thank you for what you have taught and done for me this semester and last semester as well. You have truly changed the way I perceive many key aspects of the world, and that is extremely difficult to do. I have learned so much intriguing information that I was oblivious to or did not know about, and that has made an impact on me…. thank you for always supporting and promoting community in class. I am not the most outgoing person and do struggle a bit with social anxiety, but you have made class feel like one big family.”

Wynter says education should be an initiation into our past stories and new story-making—the story of our human species. This isn’t describing what is; this story-making IS us. It is no wonder we feel run over by the authoritarians. They have been winning the story-making competition. It’s the only thing that awful man is good at. You know who else is good at making stories that become real in their performance, in their telling? Queer folk. You don’t have to identify as queer to be good at this. They are queer (some of them literally), but some just figuratively. As Snyder points out, they are occupying the position of oppressed and Christian when they are neither, simply by invoking the tropes in such unbelievably exaggerated, hyberbolic terms—isn’t that a drag show?

Drag represents fiction, camp, exaggeration; it highlights the performance of all gender. Trans represents non-fiction, passing, changing; it highlights the construction of all gender. However, neither are the lesser imitations of some more real, essential male or female identity. In fact, Gayatri Gopinath’s (see Impossible Desires) conception of reversal of valuation of diaspora and nation allowed me to see this same reversal of genderqueer and cisgender, as an analytic: “Viewing the (home) nation through the analytical frame of diaspora allows for a reconsideration of the traditionally hierarchical relation between nation and diaspora, where the former is seen as merely an impoverished imitation of an originary national culture.” Just as Gopinath productively queers diaspora by seeing it not as the “inauthentic imitation” of the original and authentic nation, transness is meta-queered when we refuse to see it as an impoverished imitation of a colonially gendered (and thus more human) body. What if this reversal also applies to Wynter’s hybridly human, not an impoverished imitation of the universal Western individual, but reading that atomized being back to itself, “giving real” Human?

“To be queer is to be born with a question in your heart,” I heard a queer artist on the radio assert. To be human is also to be born with a question in your heart. Not “what is like to be me?” but “what is it like to be a human?” This is the fight. We must win elections, we must participate in mutual aid, we must strike. And we must play with how to take place as human, because in doing so, we win the narrative, the war of position.

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