Alienation, Idealization, and Modeling

Models allow us to expose, explore, and excavate our assumptions. This is especially true for the sorts of assumptions that concern scholars of marginalization and resistance, who aim to show how patriarchy, colonialism, and related structures shape our lives. Yet within this scholarship, there is a recurrent skepticism toward practices of modeling, particularly formal or idealizing practices. These critiques portray modeling as anything from necessarily sexist to perniciously universalizing to oppressive. While these claims are mistaken, they nevertheless share a crucial and underappreciated undercurrent: alienation. I argue that alienation provides a more fundamental and more precise framework for evaluating modeling practices. This reframing clarifies the normative stakes of exclusionary modeling while preserving formal techniques for the projects that they are especially well-positioned to promote: exposing entrenched assumptions, resisting “obfuscatory accommodation,” and facilitating engagement across epistemic and political divides.