She who stumbles

I made my blog private for a short while because I have a paper to write, and the blog world is just too distracting for me to avoid. The paper remains unwritten, but I decided to make SWS public again because today has been an eventful day and I feel the need to say something about it.

1. Today hundreds of Melbourne taxi drivers blocked off streets in the centre of the Melbourne CBD

I walked into work today to see the TV covered in images of shirtless, shouting brown men in the middle of Melbourne and wondered what was going on.

Notice how I highlighted race first? Apparently it never occurred to the news media, who framed it as an issue about safety, about cabbies wanting safety screens. According to the mainstream media, this is not about the fact that Jalvinder Singh, an international student from India, was stabbed while doing one of the few jobs available to international students and that mounted police were called in. If it’s about anything else, it’s about the mental health of his attacker.

Which brings me to my final point: are student organisations going to take this up? I have a feeling they won’t, despite being in one, and despite the fact that May Day is tomorrow.

2. There has been a massive bust at the Block in Redfern hot on the heels of the unveiling of a new plan to upgrade the train station and build new high-density apartments in the area

I don’t have time now to go into the entire history of Redfern, the 2004 uprising, or the State government’s triple-pronged attack in the form of: ghettoisation, gentrification, and police brutality (perhaps adding co-optation of the local Aboriginal Housing Corporation into the mix). Suffice it to say, this is convenient timing for a drug raid, when anyone who walks through the station knows that police can see everything that’s going on from the top of their tower down the road.

This is not something the newspapers will tell you, though they’ll happily print the two stories side-by-side.

3. The Rudd government plans to remove unequal laws regarding de-facto relationships, so same-sex couples can enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples

I have to confess to being somewhat blind to the legal aspect of this, and to the implications for queer politics (who’s advocating for what model of rights for same-sex unions, who’s likely to feel how), but I have to say it looks pretty ambitious. De-facto relationships have many of the privileges of marriages… which is why I’m wondering what the Opposition’s response will be (not that it’s terribly relevant, given that the ALP has a majority in both houses of parliament).

4. [Something I should've blogged about before, but:] A refugee family from Sierra Leone is being kept apart because of the prohibitive costs of DNA testing, which the Department of Immigration demands before they can go ahead and reunite the family

Regarding the families of people of colour, I was thinking about something Brownfemipower was talking around with regard to feminism, women of colour, and families. It seems like Bfp’s focus on this issue was informed by critical engagement with racial issues as a parent and a feminist (notice that I say was). As a young, unmarried, childless woman, that stands out to me. It’s something I think needs to be engaged with more, at least in the feminism I’m exposed to and practice with my peers.

I want to explore this more: violence against families of colour and other social bonds between people of colour, not because I think those bonds are inherently virtuous (hell, they can be oppressive and downright abusive at times), but because of how white supremacy constitutes itself through enacting these forms of violence. How are white families constituted when they’re not subjected to the same kind of institutional violence? At the risk of ending up with a heavily functionalist analysis, what is white supremacy doing, when it’s attacking familial structures this way?

Secondly, as it pertains to women of colour, as women, what are these politics — of fertility, of sexuality, of bodies — producing in the consciousness of women of colour?

It might seem like I’m asking these questions because nobody is answering them, but I know that isn’t the case. I think I’m highlighting my own ignorance more than anything. Or perhaps the way that important voices are silenced, so we go over the same problems again and again.

I’m being brief and rather more simple and direct than I normally am, because I don’t have much time. I did want to mention these things, though.

So I was all excited about being able to find new blogs/posts through the new WordPress feature that adds related posts to the end of each post.

Then I found out that it was linking my blog with a blog by a white guy who claims to be a “racial realist” and writes a bunch of racist shit. Given that The Angry Black Woman has just gotten over a white supremacist attack, I’m pretty wary of any link between SWS and anything white supremacist.

So I left a comment on the announcement post, and came back to my dashboard to find a troll comment. Note the obviously fake email address and banal sexism.

CaptainReality
fake@ibm.com | 121.45.94.116

Feminists are irrelevant losers. Their ideas die with them, because they’re invariably childless. They’re all so miserable and dour.

Anyhow, I’m off to make sure my daughter has dollies to hug and toy prams to push around so that she doesn’t become a miserable spinster like most of you lot.

So women of colour are, yet again, forced away from using a powerful networking tool because of actual or potential attacks. Hm.

Anyway, I’d suggest that most of you disable the feature. You can do so by going to the Design tab in your dashboard, clicking on Extras, and then checking the box that lets you disable the possibly related posts feature. I’ve also posted about it in the announcement thread (currently waiting for my comment to come out of moderation) and in the forums (if any shit starts there, I will start throwing knives), so maybe WP will change the feature altogether.

I’m going to make a comment policy too now, cos I now feel I need to specify that if you’re arsehole enough to use a fake email address your words must not be worth much in the way of dialogue, so you’ll be treated as a troll and blacklisted. And because this blog seems to be getting heaps more traffic lately, just off the whole feminist blogsplosion.

Edited to add: The comments policy is here. It’s not ideal, but it’s something. It’s also very late for me and I want to go to bed.
You might also notice a new Creative Commons License on my sidebar over there. Don’t be a jerk in comments and don’t steal my shit. That is basically it.

Edit #2: I’ve disabled the ‘Possibly related posts’ feature, but it doesn’t seem to be working. My blog is still showing up on the links at other sites.

Deep apologies to everyone I have ongoing discussions with and those whose comments were left in moderation. My internet access at home is down and due to the public holidays there’s not much chance of it being fixed this week.

There won’t be any updates until it’s back up again, since I can’t do much research when I’m offline.

Have a happy holiday season, everyone, and if I don’t exchange greetings with you before then, have a happy new year.

My thesis is finished, making me a free agent (almost) now!

I’m very slightly burnt out on academic writing, but I do have some stuff to say Re: the thesis, knowledge production, race and academia. I’ll probably get around to writing that later in the week.

Also, APEC is coming up. I will be busy.

I need to get back into the swing of the blogosphere. Right now my intellectual and political interests aren’t very current-affairs-y and not neatly fitting into blog post formats. Hopefully that’ll change once I catch up on blogs.

Meanwhile, Blackamazon put together a fantastic edition of the Carnival Of Radical Action: Back to School - Knowledge as Radical Action. Go check that out!

Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis is hosting the next CORA!

But for now I’ll do a little dance of freedom! {dance}

I apologise for my silence here. Many of the things I’ve talked about in this blog I’ve taken up in my activism and so I don’t feel I need an outlet for those ideas so much. And that’s taken up my time and energy, so I haven’t read or written in blogs for a little while.
Meanwhile, because of an extension, I have a little over a month and a half to finish my thesis. Most of my writing energy needs to go into that right now, and I don’t have time to keep up blogging and thesis writing at the same time.

The one thing I can commit to is a monthly CORA post, since I feel somewhat responsible for the Carnival starting in the first place.

So, until Spring, you’ll hear very little from me. I have some big ideas which I’ll see if I can get going after that. Seeyou all then!

Love,
Fire Fly

I was planning to write up some posts this weekend — I’ve had some great conversations with people about strategy and politics in activism — but yesterday my eldest uncle died.

He was quite ill, and old. My mother didn’t get a chance to see him one last time before he passed away, although she and her brothers and sisters were starting to plan a trip to see him when we were in India earlier this year. And now she’s here without them to support her, which is hard.
This is one of the big reasons why I don’t like it here.

I’m also sick, damp, and cold, and I have a whole lot of assessment work to do. So I’ll have to put off blogging for a little while longer while I knuckle down and try to concentrate on getting things done offline.

The Carnival of Radical Action will still happen — please promote it widely and get your thoughts together for submissions — but not much else until then.

My apologies.

There are still a couple of weeks to go before the second Carnival of Radical Action goes up! And it’ll be hosted right here at She Who Stumbles. The first one was so great that we want to do it all over again and bring you another… and another, and another… and many more to come!

Here are the guidelines from the first carnival:

The Carnival of Radical Action

Most of us are organizers or activists in our real lives. Or at the very least, we think about it an awful lot and wish we had the skills and/or knowledge to organize. But contrary to the images of protest that make front pages and cause our hearts to swell–actual organizing is not as easy as it looks–nor is it very glamorous.

More often than not, the process it takes to actually get to the glamorous protest part is boring, tedious, filled with infighting, or done by one or two overburdened people who haven’t quite figured out how to say no.

And yet, the organizing part is so vitally important to achieving liberation (whatever that may be). It was through tons and tons of grass roots organizing and hard work that the right managed to come to power in the U.S. the way it has. The Zapatistas and the U.S. based Civil Rights movement both also have a history of achieving goals towards liberation through grassroots organizing.

So how does one go about doing this grassroots organizing?

That’s what this carnival is all about. I will be accepting any posts/submissions that have anything to do with organizing on a grassroots level. Some topic ideas that you might feel inclined to think about:

How do you do radical leftist organizing in the Midwest [or wherever you are]? How do you confront racism/sexism/disableism/homophobia/classism etc within your group? How do you work with a community instead of on a community? How do you confront accessibility issues (that is, you’re all working class mothers and there’s rarely a time to meet or the site where you meet is not wheelchair accessible etc)? What’s been the major problem/setback your group has faced? How did it over come it? What has been a successful tactic in your organizing (for example, you found that taking pictures of violent cops and posting them online is more successful in stopping the abuse than reporting them to their superiors)? If you’re a life time activist, what are some problems you see today with organizing compared to when you first started? Or, if you’ve never organized before, write about why you never have.

This carnival will be about sharing strategies more than finding a “right” answer. In the world we face today where there are so many intersecting forms of oppression, one answer will not fit every community. But something that worked for one community might work for another if they alter it and adjust it to suit their own needs.

I’d like to add that we don’t have a fixed definition of “radical” here. By radical we don’t necessarily mean revolutionary, and we don’t exclude revolutionary action either. Rather, I would say that this carnival is about an emergent definition of radical that comes out of the organising and activism that people undertake, rather than a pre-existing definition that can be applied across contexts. This is about elaborating the process of change, and empowering people to take part in it through blogging. (In that sense, what I’m doing right now is radical too!)

Unfortunately this means we do have to exclude some things. There are fine lines to be drawn between individual action and collective action. One person can make a difference, but we’re talking about intervention into broad social processes that affect a whole range of people, especially oppressed people. Talking about those processes isn’t enough either — we want to know how to change them!

Moreover, this carnival was started by women of colour who have a strong commitment to empowering woc through blogging. This blog is a safe space for woc, and I have a responsibility to other woc to keep it that way. As such, anything that is implicitly or explicitly harmful to woc interests won’t be accepted.

The deadline for submissions is June 21st.

I live in Australia, which makes the time difference tricky. Sydney is 13-15 hours ahead of most places in North America. So the carnival deadline is June 21st, but the carnival will go up a day or two later, according to local time here.

I know quite a few people are going along to the Allied Media Conference, which is from June 22 to 24. I chose the date to give everyone who’s going a chance to submit something to the carnival before they leave. We’re hoping to organise a post-AMC edition of the carnival that rounds up all the live-blogging and conference reports that people write! (If you want to volunteer to host that edition of the carnival, let me know via email.)

You can email me with your submission or use the BlogCarnival.com submission form.

Looking forward to seeing all your posts!

I’ve signed up with del.icio.us so that I can store links in one spot. I’ve been thinking I might put together some online resources for certain topics, and I think del.icio.us would be perfect for that too. It’s amazing how much great stuff there is on the tubes, which doesn’t stand out until you look for it.

But in the meantime, I have to write a bunch of thesis, and I have two papers due. I’d love to be a superhero and manage to do all that and write hard-hitting, thought-provoking blog posts, but I’m being a bit realistic and I’m gonna have to regretfully say that they’re probably gonna be thin on the ground for the next couple of months, while I put my thesis together.

I’ll be bookmarking all the good articles I see with del.icio.us, though, which means you’ll still have lots of awesome theory and politics to read. I am fire_fly on del.icio.us. There’s a widget in my sidebar that lists my latest links, and apparently there’s a feed of my favourites (at http://del.icio.us/rss/fire_fly), but I’m not sure if it’s working or not.

In other news, the time and date for the anti-racism reading group I’ve been planning has finally been chosen. It’ll be during the time that the women’s collective usually holds their reading groups, which makes me feel I ought to give it a gender focus. The first chapter of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman is a good candidate, since it brings together race, gender, and an Australian perspective really well. Otherwise, it’ll probably be a US black or Chicana feminist reading, although that’s less relevant to Australia… I was thinking of going with something from Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks until the women’s collective volunteered their time and venue.
It’s funny how I have a thesis bibliography with at least 100 references on it, but when it comes to deciding on a reading to start up a student anti-racism activist collective, my mind comes up blank! I have a feeling it’s because all of the references deal with specific race issues, while none of them take all the issues on, and because I’m so immersed in this literature that, trying to see what will be most accessible and comprehensive to someone who isn’t writing a thesis on race, is nearly impossible!

Speaking of learning and activism, BFP has mentioned that she’s planning to write some posts on how to organise, and while I reflect on the direction this anti-racism collective will take, I really feel that some bloggy discussions on techniques, methods, strategies, and tactics in activism would be good (and timely!). After some stints in activist campaigns that left me feeling very negative about activism, I’d like to have a better-informed idea of what I’m getting into, as well as more ideas about how to do activist work. Publicity about diverse campaigns and strategies is great for getting ideas, but I’d love to see more ‘technical’ discussion of how to conduct activist organising. I think a lot of people would benefit from this kind of blog activity, and also that lots of people have something to contribute to a discussion like that. So, this is my official cheer to BFP, and any other bloggers who want to kick-start something like this.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and begin by talking about the anti-racism reading group we have planned for next week. Eventually, I’d like to organise and host a blog carnival about organising (but that may have to wait until I finish the big T). Who’s with me?

Since WordPress enabled contact forms (which I saw right after getting a comment complaining that I didn’t have any visible contact details), I made one and put it up, so that anyone who wants to send me email can do so via the form. I tested it, and it works fine.

Also, WordPress seems to handle the spam queue oddly — it’ll tell me it’s removed so many comments, but not show them until there are about a dozen. So if you’ve made a comment and I haven’t approved it, it might’ve got stuck in the invisible spam queue. Sorry about that. :-/ I’ll approve them as soon as they’re visible!

Wow, Brownfemipower of the excellent Women of color blog tagged me with a Thinking Blogger Award! What an honour!

Here are the rules of the meme:

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.
The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

These are my picks. These are blogs that have pushed my mental boundaries in one way or another that really stuck in my mind. Since I’m new to the blogosphere and the meme, I’m gonna mix up recent and older posts, because there sure is some solid gold buried in archives.

1. Angry Brown Butch: I found Jack’s blog when it was linked by someone in an anti-racist LiveJournal community. The issue was gentrification. This post transformed my ideas about what’s going on in the Redfern community. Although I’d been told that gentrification has already happened in Sydney, I knew from a research project I did for an undergrad class that displacement and neoliberalism are affecting people of colour on the very doorstep of our university. Linking capitalism to indigenous dispossession (and subsequent indigenous housing issues) through Jack’s words on gentrification and race blew my mind. While the communities Jack is talking about aren’t necessarily indigenous, the way Jack talks about race, space, and class just really hit the right mental nodes.

2. Diaries of an eccentric nerd athaba hijibiji: Zooey’s posts on postcolonialism and radical women of colour feminism do a lot for me. They make me think, they make me feel implicated/included in the struggles of people of colour around the world, but at the same time they challenge me about the privilege I have in relation to those struggles. Zooey strikes a balance between reflection and responsibility; theory and practice. I’m especially grateful for her post Women of Color Feminisms, Chela Sandoval etc. which encompasses so many excellent thoughts.

3. Women of Color blog: BFP manages to push my mind in new directions with pretty much every post. The “thinkiest” for me so far has been her post on pornography, which is a wonderful example of her amazing mind! BFP is a crucible of synthesis, because she combines these insights with posts about activism in the arenas of labour, anti-violence, media, anti-racism, peace, queer rights… as well as occasional posts about literature, academia, and theory. How can all this fit inside one woman? This question inspires me to push myself to understand and engage more and in new ways.
I know BFP tagged me with this meme (meaning she got the award before tagging me with it), but I’m so in awe of her blog that I have to name her here.

4. Having Read the Fine Print……: I’ve just recently started reading this blog, but the link in Donna’s blog to BlackAmazon’s post on “Sofia Coppola feminism” really got me thinking about how to deconstruct the feminist category of “woman” (despite the naysayers who herald the death of justice by such a move), and made it abundantly clear why we need to keep doing that.

5. Queer Dewd Formerly Known As (): QD/Bitch|Lab has, in the past, got me thinking really deeply about feminism and about the implications of our own political stances. Posts about sex wars and feminist positioning reignited my interest in feminism, which had very much taken a back seat to my politics until recently.

According to the rules, I’m only allowed to tag five people, but I should share the love with every blog I read. My time is precious and I spend it on these for a reason — your blogs are good, people! I don’t think there’s a blogger who doesn’t make me think. But these have influenced my thinking in particularly noticeable ways, and I wanna acknowledge that. I have no doubt that all of you will get the acknowledgement you deserve from the blogosphere, because you are brilliant.

Goodnight!

So my first couple of posts have received a bit of positive attention, which is nice and flattering, but also pretty scary.

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