She who stumbles

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.

First of all, I have to sigh and restate my desire to get away from blogosphere conflicts that centre around white North American women. I consider the conflict itself a waste of time for me, since I don’t think I’m going to make a difference to the business of the US feminist blogosphere by contributing on white peoples’ blogs.

I am appropriating from this conflict a few specific issues which I want to address, because they caught my attention and jibed with a few other things I’ve been thinking about. But they do involve criticism of another blogger, who is being criticised for a few other things at the moment. If that hurts her feelings, well, ok.

I want to talk about the blogging v. book publishing and how the divergence between these two modes of communication reflects divergences in social justice work in general. My ideas about his have been informed by the work of Brownfemipower in writing about the nonprofit-industrial complex and blogging as a tool for liberation. (And yes, I’m referring to the Incite! Women of Color Against Violence anthology with a similar title, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.)

I guess my other deleted comment* from the Feministe thread is a good place to start:

I don’t buy that in the years of reading and commenting at Bfp’s blog, Amanda didn’t notice that Bfp was working on dealing with immigration as a feminist issue. I can remember, last year, Bfp blogging about every single issue that Marcotte mentions in her article. If Amanda wants credit for not being stupid, then she has to own up to paying attention to a blog she claims to read.

I also find the article in question highly bizarre since it doesn’t mention a single immigrant women’s/women of colour organisation which is working on the issues, despite Marcotte’s willingness to make ambiguous statements about the relevance of feminism and intersectionality. Returning to Jessica Hoffmann’s piece, it’s clear that the state of feminism is such that it’s women of colour who are the innovators and doing the most cutting-edge work. Hoffmann is one white woman who isn’t afraid to credit specific woc for that work. So why the disappearing act with woc in Marcotte’s article? Why do woc appear only as victims, but not the originators of the concept of intersectionality — one of the ideas which woc use to push for liberation?

It points to a common practice whereby white people render women of colour, especially radical woc activists, invisible. Where white women take credit for the innovations of woc. This is harmful to women of colour. It reduces the visibility of the resources which are out there, and it limits the growth of woc-initiated initiatives.

I for one don’t trust Marcotte’s judgement in deciding who is out to get her and who has genuine criticism. It’s common for her to claim that her critics are jealous of her book deal. I find it interesting that accusations against her are egregious and unethical because she’s a professional, but that she can attribute all kinds of motives to people who don’t have book deals, and that’s okay because writing isn’t their livelihood. So accountability in the feminist movement has to go out the window to support those privileged women who get into positions of power? So the work of women of colour is less valuable than that of white women because woc are unpublishable (then again, Marcotte’s publisher is Seal Press)? Again, I would expect that from conservative feminist organisations like NOW, not from people who are familiar with and accept the work of radical women of colour like Brownfemipower. I don’t accept the implicit vanguardism in that formulation.

If it’s personal and about Amanda Marcotte’s livelihood, then it should be equally personal for Bfp and all the women of colour involved too. If Marcotte stands to have her means of making a living damaged by accusations of “stealing,” what do woc stand to lose? And the answer is no less personal, no less vital, than the means of our existence too. Woc might not make our bucks by blogging, but woc have long criticised and resisted co-optation by capitalism as the strategy for achieving justice (and yes, Bfp blogged about this as well). For radical women of colour, blogging in itself is a tool for change, used in different ways than it is used by white liberal feminists.
Hence why white liberal feminists who do deal in capitalism have to face up to the onus of dealing justly with these alternatives. And that means not appropriating, and giving support to woc initiatives whenever possible. I do not see that Marcotte has done these things, and in fact has made a series of excuses to avoid doing them in the future.

The fact is, ‘professionalisation’ in feminism is not a new issue nor an issue specific to white US feminists. I have had a number of conversations with women around the world who have criticised the women who take up “leadership” positions in their regional/local/national feminist movements through a combination of class/ethnic/race/sexual/able-bodied privilege and professionalisation of feminist work.

The criticisms — that these women represent only a narrow agenda based on an even narrower conception of the problems, that they are self-serving and unresponsive, that their work is compromised by the agendas of business, academia and the state — are predictable and well-worn, but still have yet to be addressed or dealt with.

However, there’s a bigger criticism out there. It’s an elephant-sized issue, and hardly anyone talks about it. Anne Summers mentioned in a speech last year, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I want to explore it more.

That is, when you rely on bureaucratisation and incorporation of high-level leaders into the state and business, once the state decides it doesn’t want to deal with women’s issues any more, you’re basically fucked. And this is what has happened to the Australian women’s movement in the eleven years that John Howard was in power. Women’s government agencies were consistently de-funded, attacked ideologically and dismantled, while sexist policies around abortion, welfare, family, childcare, maternity leave and workplace relations were put into place.

This is also occurring in the environmental movement, where large NGOs are becoming more conservative so as not to lose lobbying access, while ineffective and even dangerous policies are being pursued (e.g. increasing reliance on nuclear energy, carbon trading, bio-fuels, carbon sinks, ‘clean coal’, electricity privatisation).

It is not a new observation I’m making (regrettably, I’m at a loss for who to link on this, other than Paula Rojas, who I found via Bfp), but I would like to explore it further than it seems to have been. Specifically, I want to explore what kinds of consequences it has on social movements when relatively fragile (and I use the term relatively here, for contrast) social movements must interact with the agendas of the state, of business, and academia. For it seems to me that these interactions are often toxic, producing a huge level of division, disorganisation and ultimately, in destroying fragile coalitions and organisations.

The much larger apparatus’ of the state, business and academia seem to appropriate the best energies of the activists whose genuine ingenuity and passion are co-opted into ossified hierarchical structures. And the movement responds by rallying support for those activists because they command unprecedented levels of power and mainstream credibility. Yet that credibility is premised on an overall tokenism about the issue at stake, be it ecological justice, women’s liberation, racial justice, disability rights, or queer rights. The hierarchical accountability structures which authorise that credibility can muzzle the most radical activist (e.g. Peter Garrett).

In many cases, a lack of political will at the top co-exists with fluctuations in activist work in creating alternatives around an issue or set of issues. Howard’s ruling out same-sex marriage rights hasn’t stalled queer community-building, and the announcement of a “new paternalism” in Aboriginal affairs hasn’t stopped Aboriginal activists from organising their communities. But when equal access to elite status becomes the goal of a political movement, it becomes apparent that it is no longer concerned with justice, and it develops a parasitic relationship with the grass-roots of that movement.

This is why I’ve started to believe in the concept of ‘revolution’, if not the actuality of a national revolution. It’s because optimism about piecemeal change relies on putting your faith in incrementalism — the model where small changes accumulate on top of each other to eventually lead to a situation of greater justice. But the strategies of the system only reproduce injustices and inequalities in different ways. If you abolish legislative racial segregation without ousting the agents whose interests lie in certain types of labour and certain types of housing being devalued, then they will continue to be devalued. If you abolish nuclear energy without ensuring more ecologically sound energy production, you stand only to strengthen fossil fuel industries and pave the way for re-nuclearisation.

Ultimately, incrementalism only works insofar as goals stay the same while everything else changes.

We may be able to make a difference by initiating reforms which work against the logic of the existing system. But that requires deliberate and very considered work, involving a great variety of groups, to achieve. And to achieve that, we need spaces in which radical forms of democracy operate, so as to establish a level of independence from outside agendas.

This is why the most path-breaking work is outside most of the power structures in society, and why non-profit/non-governmental organisations, government agencies, and for-profit corporations lag so far behind in transforming society in the shape of radical justice. It’s why the revolution will not be published, and certainly not by Seal Press. It’s because the most groundbreaking feminist work isn’t being published at all, and in fact is in an antagonistic relation to the publishing industry and the academic-industrial complex.

Perhaps grass-roots radicalism will frame the shape of a new, just society, because it needs to frame new ways of being to survive. Or perhaps those new ways of being are only transitional forms, or maybe they’re just instrumentally useful. I’m not a soothsayer, so I don’t have the answer to that. I do, however, believe that I need grass-roots radicalism to survive, and that I can see changes occurring because of what I do. That’s good enough for me; I don’t need a book deal.

* With Feministe and the thread in question I can readily believe it was just a case of caught-in-moderation, but it doesn’t seem to have affected anyone else, and the mod restrictions seem lax enough that a pointless provocateur got through when I didn’t. After the Seal Press imbroglio, I’m just a little bit sensitive to being censored for making reasonable criticisms, so excuse me if I need to joke about it to blow off steam.

I have to say, after the whole Yes Means Yes imbroglio, I swore to myself that I would never ever get involved in another US feminist blogwar. If US women of colour — who clean up after white women, who take care of white women’s kids, who cook white women’s food, who teach white women in schools, etc. etc. — are invisible to white women, then international women of colour must really be off the radar! And I’m okay with that, because there’s not much I need from white North American women, nor do I want to be part of their “feminist” movement, and I’m sure as hell not gonna fight them for it. I have my own battles to fight, and plenty to gain, right here.

[Notice how I've just given up on promising posts that I know I won't deliver on? Blogging is just not my priority lately. This one only appears because it's a very spontaneous response to some web shenanigans.]

But I did get involved. After seeing the asinine behaviour of Brooke Warner and Krista Lyons-Gould, editor and manager of Seal Press (the people who brought you Full Frontal Feminism and Love And Consequences), I made a comment on their blog post about the issue. (In case you didn’t catch it, they were incredibly racist and rude on Blackamazon’s blog.)

Along with other comments made by other women of colour, mine was deleted. Discussion in closed forums revealed tales of others’ deleted comments.

My comment was about the gross double-standards being perpetuated by Brooke and Krista, and the Seal Press “team”. In The World According to Brooke and Krista, only they are allowed to have feelings, and they get to lash out at anyone they want to when their feelings are hurt. They don’t have to face any consequences for lashing out, because they’re more important than everyone, especially women of colour, on account of they own the means of production. Women of colour should be grateful to Brooke and Krista for even condescending to speak to us, because they’re so busy running their press that they have no time to try to work with women of colour, who are basically unpublishable anyway, their books will never sell. Oh, but when they do publish women of colour, they get to use that work to flounce around proclaiming how virtuous and anti-racist they are, because clearly women of colour are choosing to work for them and not those other white people over there.

Secondly, my point was that they basically got a whole lot of business advice for free in the comment thread on their blog. People were critical, but many came with a genuine spirit of engaging and educating, and gave a lot of professional-quality advice to the Seal editors. I wanted to emphasise that they should at least acknowledge the people who gave them this advice, since appropriating and then taking the credit for the contributions of women of colour tends to be somewhat endemic amongst white feminists. It’s a bit of a hot-button issue right now.

Now, it hardly needs to be pointed out that deleting comments that are critical of you and that put pressure on you to act in a certain way really really doesn’t inspire trust in people who you just insulted. In fact, it might even be called a negative discourse that is engaged by haters.

…

Ohnoes, it looks like only white women can affect the precise level of whiny melodrama that it would take to make assertions like that. I’ll have to settle for actual critique.

In that vein, I’m going to invite anyone who’s had their comment deleted to post it here. Say what you think about Seal Press!

Me, personally, in the spirit of skewering double standards, I’m gonna settle for the immortal words of Blackamazon: Fuck Seal Press. You just made yourselves irrelevant.

I have a feeling that if the irrelevant feminists are the ones getting book deals, then pretty soon all the feminists doing groundbreaking work will stop paying attention to what gets published in books and start looking at other media that feminists have used to express themselves. I mean, that’s what feminist historiography has done — find women outside the malestream and analyse their strategies for survival, growth, change and challenge. Radical woc internationalism may have a ways go, but compared to this crap we’re basically on fire.

Edited to add: And in the spirit of acknowledging your sources, I want to quote Jessica Hoffmann’s An Open Letter to White Feminists:

[The] dominant, white-led feminist movement is consistently unresponsive to the grassroots while it works within and strengthens the very structures that violently maintain social hierarchies.

[...]

In the summer and fall of 2007, I found myself invited to participate in a slew of meetings and conference calls organized by small, new majority-white “feminist” groups around the United States; over and over again, members wondered earnestly how they could draw more women of color to participate in their projects. Around the same time, I read and heard a whole lot of white feminist media makers explaining that “we” need to show young women “why feminism matters.” Sometimes I asked them why, in the face of a series of egregious, in some cases highly publicized examples of state violence against marginalized people (e.g., Jena 6 and the New Jersey 4), prominent white feminists are MIA in and largely ignorant of the work and analyses of major, often feminist-of-color-led movements against state violence? And, I wondered, what is your feminism for, and why does it matter? Because feminists of color don’t seem to need convincing on that point — they’re engaged in profound, intergenerational, cross-cultural grassroots work that is transforming not only feminist movement but all social-change movements. [emphasis mine]

It’s not just the “haters” saying this. So does it make it easier to digest if a white woman says it?

I’m going to try to write more about this later, in response to Bfp’s post about identity politics. I want to unpack the notion that women of colour feminism is a “home” to which we can return after fighting injustice on several fronts. The best unpacking of those dynamics is Bernice Johnson Reagon, in her piece ‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century’. The piece is about the dangers of coalition work, and of working across difference. I like to read it alongside Chela Sandoval’s ‘U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World’. I think what these two texts highlight is that women of colour feminism is about more than ‘woc issues’ or about creating a space for women of colour excluded from other communities and movements, that it involves distinct methodologies. I think it’s especially pertinent to point out that women of colour feminist traditions centralise issues differently than other social movements, define subjects differently than other social movements, and operate differently than other social movements. This isn’t to say that women of colour feminism is perfect. But the conversations on alliance and difference have a bit of history amongst women of colour, and it gets beyond 101 level.
To me, Bernice Reagon’s piece is a logical — and less intellectualised! — extension of Audre Lorde’s comments about difference in ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. These texts describe the creative, and terribly difficult, engagement across difference that needs to occur when we come together under the banner of ‘women of colour’ only to realise that there are still many differences dividing us.

Enough of my prattling. On with the show.

Coalition Politics: Turning the Century*

(*based upon a presentation at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival 1981,
Yosemite National Forest, California)

BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

I’ve never been this high before. I’m talking about the altitude. There is a lesson in bringing people together where they can’t get enough oxygen, then having them try to figure out what they’re going to do when they can’t think properly. I’m serious about that. There probably are some people here who can breathe, because you were born in high altitudes and you have big lung cavities. But when you bring people in who have not had the environmental conditioning, you got one group of people who are in a strain—and the group of people who are feeling fine are trying to figure out why you’re staggering around, and that’s what this workshop is about this morning.

I wish there had been another way to graphically make me feel it because I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.

I’m Bernice Reagon. I was born in Georgia, and I’d like to talk about the fact that in about twenty years we’ll turn up another century. I believe that we are positioned to have the opportunity to have something to do with what makes it into the next century. And the principles of coalition are directly related to that. You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.
A hundred years ago in this country we were just beginning to heat up for the century we’re in. And the name of the game in terms of the dominant energy was technology. We have lived through a period where there have been things like railroads and telephones, and radios, TV’s and airplanes, and cars, and transistors, and computers. And what this has done to the concept of human society and human life is, to a large extent, what we in the latter part of this century have been trying to grapple with. With the coming of all that technology, there was finally the possibility of making sure no human being in the world would be unreached. You couldn’t find a place where you could hide if somebody who had access to that technology wanted to get to you. Before the dawning of that age you had all these little cute villages and the wonderful homogenous societies where they everybody looked the same, did things the same, and believed figure out the same things, and if they didn’t, you could just kill them and nobody would even ask you about it.

We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there. Even when we have our “women-only” festivals, there is no such thing. The fault is not necessarily with the organizers of the gathering. To a large extent it’s because we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be posting more on the Aurukun case in a little while. I’m slowly easing myself back into blogging… I have no idea how people with full-time jobs can make time for it, honestly!

But for now I have a bit of a commentary and critique of other things happening in the feminist blogosphere.

Jessica Valenti has announced that she has a new book contract and has put the call out for an anthology on rape culture that she’s co-editing with Jaclyn Friedman.

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Potential essay subjects could include;

* Revamping how public sex education is taught, and to whom.

* The new backlash against rape survivors (i.e., media obsession with drinking, Girls Gone Wild culture being to blame for assault)

* Bringing men back into the conversation, making men leaders in the movement to end rape culture

* Thoughts on “enthusiastic consent”

* Taking Back the Porn: How changing the pornography industry can stop rape

* The power of language (naming rape for what it is, or the new myth of “gray rape”)

* A primer for men on sexual assault

* How good sex (where women’s pleasure is central) can mean an end to rape culture, and how a society that values genuine female sexual pleasure will make it easier to identify and prosecute rapists.

* Rethinking sexual interaction as a private joint performance, as opposed to as an exchange of a commodity or service

* An analysis of the economics of female sexual alienation/oppression, and an economic model for resistance

* Holding the MSM accountable for torture porn, kidnapping crusades and faux feminism.

* Desegmenting the Market: overcoming commercially enforced sexual stereotypes to organize across race, class, gender, and difference

* On pulling out the invisible lynchpin of rape culture: homophobia

* Creating accurate media representations of rape

Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”

In general, I’m very supportive of exploring consensuality as an element of rape culture, and some of the proposals in the call-out are exciting to me as a feminist. I think that good sex education ought to be a big priority of feminism, to empower young people to make healthy decisions about their lives and bodies. I also think that sex education can be a life-long endeavour, that adult feminists have a great deal to learn, and young people a great deal to offer, when it comes to understanding sex and revolutionising sexual practice.

However, the way this anthology is being framed seems really limited to me.

I’ve seen pro-consent activism that went into a great deal of depth about the needs of a consent-based approach to sexuality. Groups like worldwithout in Melbourne have some great resources on sexual assault based on ongoing activism they’re doing around the issue. So I’m in no way unsupportive of the stated aims of this project.

But while talking about the IDA for community response to sexual assault, I also heard some criticism of consent-based work on sexual violence because of all the people who experience sexual violence without having the opportunity to give or withhold consent. Indeed, given that the majority of sexual assaults occur in institutions, not within the family or amongst intimate partners, this is a glaring omission.

The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.

This data reminds me of some of Bfp’s writing about women’s experiences of sexual violence when crossing the US-Mexico border, women who are raped by border guards or in immigration detention facilities…

And I think that this kind of blatantly non-consensual sexual contact, which can either serve the purpose of sexual pleasure or not, occurring in institutional contexts has to be considered when defining the term ‘rape culture’ and deciding what “the key to dismantling rape culture” really is.
I don’t think that the call-out for the anthology deals with systemic and institutionalised sexual violence very well, and it seems to privatise the issue, so that partner and acquaintance rape is central to the understanding of ‘rape culture’ being employed.

So if “female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture” in a world in which women are far from equal to each other, then which women’s orgasms are “the key to dismantling rape culture”?

That’s a very strong claim to make, and I have serious doubts that an anthology framed as it is in the call-out will be able to live up to that claim.

I think that this call-out is implicitly centralising certain kinds of women and certain kinds of rape by crowding-out many other kinds of women, and other kinds of rape. And I thought feminism, and Valenti, had learned enough from “identity politics” to realise how problematic that is.

And in that case, I don’t think it’s advisable to claim to “fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex” or to frame a pleasure-positive, consent-based sexual politics in opposition to an oversimplified caricature of older feminisms. For one thing, older feminists such as Betty Dodson have done ground-breaking work in promoting female sexual pleasure as a means of empowerment; for another, this newer work wouldn’t exist without that older work.

In fact, the only means I have of making sense of daily cavity searches in women’s prisons, or of friends telling me about the humiliation and fear they experienced when being strip-searched, is to divest myself of any concept of sexual consent and to return to the older feminist catchphrase: “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power”.

Stop the Invasion!

International Day of Action, November 17th

In June this year, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced that there would be a ‘National Emergency Response’ to combat child abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. The measures announced included the quarantining of half of all welfare payments, the abolition of the Community Development Employment Program, the appointment of managers for 73 prescribed communities, compulsory sexual health examinations of children, and the abolition of the permit system, amongst other things.

These measures are a violation of human rights, and is obviously racist and authoritarian. The passage of the Emergency Response legislation is dependent on the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, and the Northern Territory Native Title Act. Federal police and the military have been sent into the NT to enforce these measures.

Aboriginal people that work through the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) manage their own wages and money. Abolishing CDEP will push people onto welfare and the welfare income management system that allows for quarantining and tight control of how people’s money is spent. Many people running businesses on CDEP in remote outstations are already being forced to move into larger regional towns. The extraordinary measures give the Federal Government power to seize lands and property without compensation. The owners of those lands and properties have no right of appeal. Lands will be leased for five years, but the government has plans to extend these measures for 99 years. It is entirely up to ministerial discretion whether rent is paid on those lands or not.

The Federal Government has appointed non-Indigenous business managers to the ‘prescribed’ communities. These managers have the power to decide who lives in a community and who must leave; they can observe any meeting of an organisation working at the community, they can change any local programme. Many Aboriginal communities consider these measures, often being administered by under-prepared military personnel, as an invasion rather than an intervention.

These measures return Aboriginal people to the days of mission stations, where life was tightly controlled by authoritarian managers. It is a return to times of colonial control on Aboriginal life, and the complete absence of any autonomy or self-determination. The removal of basic property rights as enjoyed by all other Australians, with the abolition of the permit system, is a gross violation of human rights. Even the Northern Territory police oppose this measure, for the likely adverse effect it will have on crime.

Some $570 million is being spent on these measures. Half of that money will be spent on the salaries of 700 new bureaucratic positions created to regulate this intervention. $88 million will be spent on measures to control the incomes of Aboriginal people on any government payment (including aged pensions and veterans payments).

This is an insult to the hard work of Aboriginal people who have been campaigning for basic services in remote communities. Roads, schools, health care, housing and social services are desperately needed by these communities. It is estimated that the housing backlog alone for Northern Territory Aboriginal communities is half a billion dollars. Moreover, with the publication of the Closing the Gap report by Oxfam earlier this year, it has been shown that Indigenous life expectancy is 17 years below that of non-Indigenous life expectancy.

A week and a half ago, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced the Federal election for November 24th.

This came shortly after Australia voted against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples (along with Canada, New Zealand and the USA).

It is time to stand up for justice for Indigenous peoples everywhere, to demand either a change of policy, or a change of government!

One week before the Australian Federal election, on November 17th, various groups across Australia will be taking action to show opposition to the Federal government’s intervention into the Northern Territory. We hope that those outside Australia will join us in calling for an end to this government, an end to racist, colonialist policies towards Indigenous people, and support for the strong self-determination that Indigenous people demonstrate every day.

With allegations that the Australian Federal government is manipulating international media about the intervention, it is vitally important that information about the intervention and views of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory are widely disseminated through social justice networks. Please use your community and activist media to promote the interests of Indigenous Australians, and Indigenous people worldwide!

Learn more:

National Aboriginal Alliance: http://www.nationalaboriginalalliance.org/
Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory - alternative to the government’s Emergency Response: http://www.snaicc.asn.au/news/documents/CAOreport8july.pdf
Women for Wik: http://www.womenforwik.org/
Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation: http://www.antar.org.au/
Oxfam: http://www.oxfam.org.au/world/pacific/australia/
Koori Mail: http://www.koorimail.com/

Things you can do:

1. Organise a protest outside the Australian Consulate in your nearest city. Make it clear that the Howard government’s shameful opportunism on human rights is gathering international criticism.
2. Donate to the National Aboriginal Alliance. Find out more on their website, here: http://www.nationalaboriginalalliance.org/
3. Spread the news of this horrendous violation of human rights to as many people as possible. Write an article about it, post to your blog about it, send the news to your friends via email. Encourage your friends to speak out about it as well.
4. If you are part of a political organisation, collective, or group, please send your words of solidarity and support to the National Aboriginal Alliance. Send messages of solidarity to: secretariat at nationalaboriginalalliance dot org.
5. Write letters to Mal Brough, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, or John Howard. You can find guidelines here: http://www.antar.org.au/action/current_actions/

I know I’ve neglected this blog lately, and I’m sorry. I wish I had the energy to get over that last hurdle of inhibition about posting. But I’ve been throwing myself into activism and essays, which hasn’t left much mental space for blogging.

I do have some big plans for this place, though, so keep watching! (Please!)

Today I’m just re-posting a comment I left at Feministe about a study of whiteness and the feminist blogosphere. I think that post encompasses many of the problems I have with critical whiteness studies as a field. Go have a read of the original post and the responses. My comment will be in the moderation queue for a while yet, so get the scoop right here at She who stumbles!

_________________________________________________________________________

Dear Katie,

Let me make this very clear before I begin:
I appreciate that you are taking the time to examine whiteness critically. I really do.

But I have many grave reservations of your rationale/methodology for your project.

First of all, I’m pretty familiar with the field of critical whiteness studies. I recently completed a year-long thesis project on whiteness and the Cronulla riots, in which I interviewed people. I am a woman of colour, an on-the-ground anti-racist activist, and a blogger. I’m from Australia, but I’m pretty familiar with the U.S. work in critical whiteness studies, having spent a good portion of the past year reading and thinking critically about it.

I originally only wanted white participants for my study as well. I took to heart Ruth Frankenberg’s lessons about trying to solicit interviews with white women for White Women, Race Matters, and I imagined I could get around the taboos of race talk by framing my questions in a certain way. In my case, my ethics committee made the final choice for me — they didn’t want me explicitly mentioning whiteness in my participant information statement.

But when one of my respondents turned out to be a person of colour, I continued with the interview and used it in my project. That’s because of a lot of work I did in reading for my thesis, most of which led back to the conclusion that not only did people of colour invent critical whiteness studies — the widely-cited Souls of White Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, is considered the first canonical work of whiteness studies — but the perspectives of people of colour are integral to its development as a discipline.

That’s because whiteness only takes on significance in relation to the racial subordination of people of colour. The privileges of whiteness are the things that people of colour don’t have, or can only get access to at great cost. So reading white testimonials against the perspectives, priorities and positions of people of colour is integral to critical whiteness studies as a discipline. And most of the better work in critical whiteness studies does this by actively including the voices of people of colour.

As such, your comment that “creating race-based safe spaces” where white people can “talk about racism without feeling so worried that folks of color will judge them” is seriously questionable on many grounds.

Firstly, because critical whiteness studies has demonstrated that white race consciousness is deeply shaped by colourblindness and aversive gestures towards racism that limit white accountability for the oppression of people of colour. While white people can acknowledge racism and talk about it, this gesture can equally be turned into an opportunistic and solipsistic pursuit of virtue, or a generalisation about people of colour (which is also something critical whiteness studies focuses on). Part of the project of critical whiteness studies is to unpack the discursive manoeuvres that do limit white race consciousness, based on what they obscure. I.e. the lives and experiences of people of colour are obscured by white race consciousness and the operation of whiteness. This is a critical aspect of racial domination. This is why the many criticisms of race-matching in qualitative research apply doubly to the study of whiteness.
Moreover, the project of critical whiteness studies is to understand the effects of this discursive closure. This cannot happen without recourse to the perspectives of people of colour.

I’m sure you’re aware that the feminist blogosphere is replete with conflict over race. I won’t go into the specific conflicts, but there are a number of issues which women of colour bloggers have with white feminist bloggers. Yours is (one of?) the first formal study (AFAIK) of race in the feminist blogosphere. That means, methodologically, there’s very little material for you to draw on in contextualising a critique of whiteness. The blogosphere conflicts are specific to this arena. Understanding them is necessary to contextualise how whiteness operates in it. Ignoring women of colour in this study means that you’ll get an incomplete picture of the field. As such, I have many doubts about how critical your study will be.

Your comments about why you’d rather avoid the perspectives of people of colour seem to indicate that you are unfamiliar with the work of women of colour bloggers and the specific criticisms and claims we make. While it is tiresome for people of colour to always be considered the authoritative voices on racism, that is mostly a response to white people not listening to us, and having to repeat ourselves. As such, I don’t see how your methodology will address your professed concern for the feelings of people of colour. Offering white people a “safe space” to talk about racism will only mean that the dynamic of exclusion and ignorance is reinforced.

Moreover, the idea that:
Within the poc group, I might have folks who are South Asian, East Asian, Latin@, Black, Native American, etc. That doesn’t make for a very good sample because different groups likely have different relationships to whiteness within the feminist blogosphere.
presumes that people of colour in the blogosphere do not interact as poc, or recognise these differences for ourselves. In fact, the opposite is true — bloggers of colour have led the way in analysis of how different groups of poc relate to whiteness, and to one another. This is accomplished through the dense and lively multi-racial blog networks we’ve formed. Ignoring the internal structure of that, and its relation to the white blogosphere (for indeed, many of the networks we’ve formed arose from conflict over race with white bloggers), means that you’re missing a vital aspect of the race politics of the feminist blogosphere.

Finally, I have huge issues with the claims that critical whiteness studies makes to “de-centring the white subject” and putting “an explicit and critical focus on whiteness”. In my experience, critical whiteness studies has limited anti-racist effects, and my experience has been borne out in the work of (white) critical whiteness scholars. In order to assert the claims to virtue of critical whiteness studies, the voices of people of colour are often drowned out. For instance, I have read pieces where white academics told people of colour that it was more important for white people to teach critical whiteness studies than for the critiques that people of colour made of whiteness to be heard. I’ve also had a teacher dismiss my concerns about my own interview project because she experienced “reverse racism” when trying to do research on Aboriginal people.

All in all, I find that the project of critical whiteness studies is undermined by its own academic practices and its elitist epistemology. Many criticisms of the claims of critical whiteness studies are discussed at length by Sara Ahmed in this article from borderlands e-journal (it’s a peer-reviewed academic journal, so you can reference it in your thesis). I strongly recommend that you read over the article, and others from the same issue.

In order to avoid many of those criticisms, it’s necessary that you examine how your own whiteness is operating in the context of the blogosphere, and your project. It might be outside the scope of your project, but I can tell you that including those concerns in a smaller, year-long project is not difficult (I included them in the literature review and methodology). Moreover, responsibility to the racial justice context which shaped critical whiteness studies fairly demands some attention to the concerns of people of colour, and a critical whiteness project is incomplete without it.

If you’d like, I can refer you to a number of readings which will elaborate many of the points I made above, and I’m happy to elaborate on anything you’d like clarified.

Good luck with your project.

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}

Welcome to the second Carnival of Radical Action!

This month has been full of ups and downs, so promoting and writing for this carnival hasn’t been a huge priority for me. But a handful of dedicated people have made wonderful submissions — this edition of the CORA is about quality, not quantity!

The theme of this edition of the carnival seems to have been “community” by default. The physical spaces that people live in and the things they do in those spaces, amongst their existing networks. The radicalism of people changing the way they relate to others.

Strategy

First up, there has been some discussion about long-term strategies and methods — the overall character of social movements. How they work from the inside, the kinds of activities that need to be co-ordinated in democratic and inclusive ways in order for social movements to be just and effect change.

Bfp’s post about grass-roots organising went into depth about the core of grass-roots organising:

Incite! has built its organizing strategy with the brickwork laid by hundreds of groups and organizations that came before it and organize alongside it. And one of the fundamental ideas that strings through all of the groups is that violation has been so ingrained into the bodies of the members of our communities, that “change” must come at the cellular level. That is–”change” does not mean “no more X”–it means living, thinking and breathing, *differently*. “Change” in this sense comes from the realization that no law will stop a war, a rape, a murder, a violation from happening. The only thing that can stop any of these acts is the person who is committing the act, and the person that is subjected to the act.

“Change” in this sense does not center an act–it centers a person.

My own submission to the carnival contrasts the ways that socialists organise with people-based organising:

Shortly after my break with the anti-war movement, I started to learn more about community-based fights against neoliberal imperialism in the Third World. The subjects of these conflicts were the revolutionary subjects — a global labouring class — that socialists always rabbited on about, but they weren’t organising in the ways that socialists prescribed. This occurred just after the anti-corporate globalisation movement was getting its act together for the Cancun conference in the Doha round of WTO talks.
Rather, these subjects were organising on a community-based level, around injustices occurring in their own lives which didn’t map neatly into the teleology of socialist critiques of capitalism. Issues like land reform, energy, food security and housing as well as workers’ rights have dominated the agenda of this global movement, and have done so in ways that defy the socialist orthodoxy yet warm the cockles of my little anticapitalist heart.

While not submitted to the carnival, the discussion at Bfp’s earlier this month about the G8 summit protest in Heiligendamm, Germany raised a number of questions about the privilege and oppression manifesting in protest tactics:
violence erupts in G8 protests:

I’m not sure what the general racial/gender/class etc. make up of anarchists is outside of these protests, but from what I have seen *at* the protests, it is usually a bunch of hyper aggressive young white males–and they smash things up and confront the police looking for a thrill–meanwhile, the marginalized communities that I am involved with and cover and *already have* a huge police presence monitoring them, don’t really need or want these confrontations.

In police brutality, anarchism, europe, feminism, labyrus asks:

And I’m trying to think - how did the various non-violent, vulnerable communities cope with this in anti-globalization contexts where there was a strong culture of diversity of tactics? How did communities of colour that participated in the Seattle demonstrations in 1999 deal with these issues, I’m wondering? What did they think of the (mostly white, actually not all that disproportionately male but the media would tell you different) anarchists there?

How do we create communities of resistance where people of colour are equal players but where we also don’t start drawing lines between “acceptable” and “unnacceptable” dissent, and in doing so play into the divide and conquer tactics of police?

Change

Secondly, the specific methods and tactics used to effect change have been explored, in the context of work people are already doing.

Kim at Bastante Already talks about the logistics and difficulties inherent in implementing the idealistic plans that many come up with, such as volunteer carpooling to provide lifts for low-income people:

Back to the suggestion. The volunteer ride base might work with the DV population as most folks have sympathy for this group (natch, they would not be permitted to go to the secret location of the shelter, but then there are meeting places, so I could work. As long as the woman doesn’t have too much to carry back to the shelter from the meeting place.)

I don’t know how well it would work with my other group, the plain old homeless/non-DV group because society has Ideas about The Homeless.

Sokari over at Black Looks shares the story of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement struggle in South Africa:

The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement is living proof that when the the organized poor start speaking for themselves it creates a serious crisis. No one not the NGOs, the Government or various middle class left sects want the poor to speak for themselves. NGOs overtly and or covertly try by all means to undermine movements of the poor and co-opt the struggle for their own selfish purposes to the point where you find that there is little difference between them and the State itself.

Devious Diva at THIS IS NOT MY COUNTRY shares the struggle of the Roma of Votanikos, Athens in her Roma Series. A guest article by Panayote Dimitras of the Greek Helsinki Monitor tells of recent actions to prevent the forced eviction of the Roma:

There was a crew preparing a documentary on the recycling of metal scrap filming the Votanikos Roma last week. They got notice that a cleaning operation was being prepared for Friday 4 pm in the second Votanikos Roma settlement. Indeed at that very time they called us to say that nine trucks and the related equipment and crew from City Hall had come to “clean” but then went to the Roma trying to trigger a new “voluntary departure” as the one that took place on 2 June in the other settlement. Papers were put in front of the Roma to sign and money was offered, the crew told us. We told them to keep one of the papers which is attached and is a garbage removal order of the municipality of Athens.

DD also has ongoing coverage of the struggle of the Roma in Votanikos; head to her blog for more!

Finally, for our fundraising plug, Rainbow Girl has developed a comic called Rainbow Girl Stars in SEXY WAR to raise money in support of the Umoja Women’s Village in Kenya:

My 38-page feminist cartoon romp, Rainbow Girl Stars in SEXY WAR, is now available for online purchase. It is an international grassroots fundraiser with all proceeds donated to Umoja Uaso Kenyan Women’s Village, a formidable group of women in Umoja, Kenya who are escaping and stopping domestic violence and sexual assault in their lives and community.

It’s available for $US6 per copy, and ALL of that will go to the Umoja!

Aaaaaaand, that’s all, folks!

This has been a great carnival to run, despite hiccups and bumps in the route. The next carnival will be a special edition, with a collection of posts about the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan (USA). Nadia of No Snow Here will be hosting that edition over at her blog. Head on over to show your support, and let any bloggers who went know about this edition of the carnival!

This is an absolute last call for submissions to the second Carnival of Radical Action!!!

Please submit. I’ve only gotten 3 eligible submissions so far and if I don’t get more I might have to cancel the carnival altogether.

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!

Since The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum has closed, Sylvia has asked me to re-post the first Carnival Of Radical Action (CORA) here.

Welcome to the first Carnival for Radical Action!

Fire Fly and I are pleased to dedicate this carnival to the phenomenal WOC blogger BrownFemiPower. This carnival idea is her brainchild. Fire Fly’s encouragement, along with these excellent submissions, gave it wings. So we thank her and all of you, first and foremost.

There are many reasons that people may choose to hit the pavement, the group meeting (whether as small as the local PTA or as large as the United Nations), the netroots, the writing pad, or the telephone. For example, what do you do when you notice a white male colleague acting extremely out of line with a young black female student, like in Miss Profe’s situation? Do you speak out? If so, how? What do you say? How do you say it?

Conversely, what if you know what to say and how to say it, but your support system is lacking? Like the dynamics in VJack’s situation, you need to organize and coordinate large groups of people who hold different views under a generally agreed-upon umbrella issue. How do you recruit and get some action started? Do you choose advocacy? Coordinated letter writing? Rallies? Create your own organization?

For the duration of this carnival, bloggers from across the ’sphere will offer answers, experiences, and encouragement for instituting radical change. From writing a letter to your local newspaper to coordinating a large rally with multiple organizations, there’s a little something for everyone who wants to learn about making a substantial impact. So let’s get started!

Methods of Organizing

Bloggers have offered their wisdom and experience to explain some of the nitty-gritty details of organizing campaigns, organizations, and events. These wonderful bloggers emphasise clear and effective communication both within the organizing group and with the rest of society.

The incomparable BFP offers, along with some great anecdotes, a comprehensive introduction to organizing from her experience with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence:

I wanted to post the national chapter of Incite!’s guidelines to organizing. It is a very very basic “how to” guide–it doesn’t tell you how to confront people’s hurt feelings after a major fuck up, for example. But it does give you a good place to start. One of the biggest mistakes newbie organizers make is starting too quick. The euphoria of finally deciding you have the power to make change is amazing and exhilarating. But ultimately it’s unsustainable. Recognizing that you have the power to change the world is necessary to get yourself into organizing–but recognizing that you personally aren’t going to change the world in your life time is also necessary. Thus, what you do needs to be done with that in mind–how can you lay a strong enough foundation such that your daughter, your granddaughter, your great granddaughter, can continue to build upon your work?

I offer Vox offers guidelines for groups and individuals who want to increase the public profile of an issue in the news media:

Political action that is mainly unknown or doesn’t toe the established party line goes mainly unreported unless there’s a proven demand. Smaller papers that could establish that demand are mainly limited to covering local issues with their own staff and whatever runs on the AP wire for everything else.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of ways to get important issues into the mainstream press; they just need proof that there will be reader interest.

The Organizing Experience

Activist organizing takes both skill and good organization. Radical bloggers have written about their impressions of organizations, and their effectiveness, inclusivity, and structure on all levels — from small reading groups, to large-scale social movements.

Petitpoussin talks about the co-operative skills she needed to run a successful reading series:

Over time I’ve become more and more interested in the idea of collaborative or collective projects — and I’m excited to see them developing on the blogosphere, through various carnivals, sites like AfroSpear, Ally Work, and arts and cultural projects like Birds of Lace press or make/shift magazine. When I read and think about community among activists, it’s not just about some realpolitik conception of critical mass to create change on a point. It’s about experiencing change in our daily lives, with the people we love and respect, as opposed to working ourselves ragged towards change as the ideal.

In a comment to this blog, Nena Lopez offers insight into the key questions for grass-roots organizations:

Coordination and organization of activists for a grass root operation is extremely tough.

[…]

We began by taking a poll of who wanted to assist in a leader & activist position while changing the issues throughout the nation. We had a meeting (teleconference)
First discussion, Are we a campaign or are we an organization? If we are an organization we must comply within the laws of our state and become organized. We established leaders by state, through a meeting (someone must always take meeting notes). This was the first tier at a corporate level.

In an older post at her (oldschool!) Blogspot blog, BFP posted about a number of principles and issues generated out of communities involved with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence efforts at community-based anti-violence strategies:

How do we incorporate justice into community accountability strategies? If we do not rely on the state to adjudicate cases of gender violence, then how do we ensure justice and fairness before holding perpetrators accountable? How do we ensure that we do not turn into vigilante groups? If we do develop processes do judge cases within a community context, will we just replicate a mini version of the oppressive state apparatus within our communities?

And another older post from Ideas for Change discusses the relative effectiveness of authoritarian and non-authoritarian organisational structures:

There is a problematic history of coercive, authoritarian and inadequate approaches to activist and citizen learning and political practice in Sydney, that is ingrained in many of our activist cultures.

You cannot really point the finger and make accusations, because it is actually very difficult to overcome the authoritarian cultural obstacles to useful and liberatory activism. There is a fine line between having an efficient operation, and excluding members from decisionmaking.

Micropolitics of Organizing

Once in the midst of taking action, sometimes it is hard to keep up the initial momentum. Either the initial problem is more complicated than expected, the supporters do not arrive as readily, or the chosen method falls short of the anticipated goals. Either way, there’s an obstacle. How can these obstacles be confronted? Here, bloggers speak of their experiences with obstacles and activism, and they share some insight on how to perceive them and how to keep moving along.

Fabi shares her personal experience and insights about how to prevent discouragement and unsustainability while working as an activist:

But what I want to focus on are my thoughts on radical actions specifically personal contributions to a organizing project and the feasiability, effectiveness and sustainbility of change and activism. Especially as a mother and full time worker, I divide the two becuase all mothers are working mothers, most of the time and energy is constrained so I always ask myself how is this {fill in the blank} organizing?

Sudy lays out Donna sends out a rousing cry for people to get off their asses and warns against accepting the “wait your turn” mentality:

I can see a day coming when the crowd at the bottom is going to overwhelm the few at the top. The majority of Americans are already discriminated against or oppressed in some way, but this is as it has always been. The difference is that today there are more of us discontented, alienated, and unrepresented since the turn of the century. Many of us are people of color and it’s time for us to come together and shove each other to the top and pull those behind us up too. I’m tired of us vs them in every discussion. I’m tired of people saying to each other, “I must have my important issues first, then we will get back to you”, and always it isn’t enough.

And in this post, Fire Fly discusses the impact that agitating for social justice can take on mental health in a personal and enlightening way:

The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and activism — is very confronting for me. In the discussions at university, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, and I’ve been in and out of the mental health system since I was very young. For me, depression is still something I treat as private, almost secret, and a matter of managing my own time and energy. This is because I’ve felt an intense amount of stigma around it from a lot of circles, especially left activist circles.

Organizing: The Aftermath

You’ve recruited. You’ve organized. You’ve planned. You’ve laughed. You’ve cried. You’ve called and written and photocopied and mobilized. What does the final product look like? Riversider has given us an example of how organizations and volunteers all meshed together in a joint effort on May Day. It’s a photoblog journey of the day’s events, so be prepared to absorb thousands of words in a blink of an eye about activism!

Thanks so much to everyone who submitted to this carnival!
We absolutely couldn’t have done it without you!

This is a fantastic example of how networking across the internet can inspire and empower people to work together for liberation. If you can spare some money, BFP has a list of bloggers who are raising funds to go to the Allied Media Conference next month who could really use your help. We support all kinds of online organising and radical collaboration!

We hope the carnival has a long life ahead of it, empowering many more in the months and years to come. Please spread the word far and wide, and start thinking about what you’ll submit to the next carnival!

The next carnival will be hosted at Fire Fly’s blog She who stumbles. Look out for more details!
Sylvia’s Note: I’ve already set up the newest submission form for entries to be sent to Fire Fly here.

UPDATE: Fire Fly has posted a call for submissions; the deadline for carnival submissions is June 21st. If you are interested in hosting future editions, please let me know by e-mailing me at sylviasrevenge [at] gmail [dot] com.

Much love,
Sylvia and Fire Fly

Today* is the last day to submit your posts for the Carnival of Radical Action! Get cracking on those posts about your activist work, people!

Guidelines for submissions are here, and you can use the blogcarnival.com page to make your submission.

I’m still really tired but I’ll try to make the deadline for my own post. -.-

* i.e. Friday 25th May. Yes, I know that my post is dated Saturday 26th, but Sylvia, who is hosting the carnival, lives in yesterday on account of being on US East Coast time. That gives Aussies extra time! Yay!

Before making the announcement that she’d be taking a break, BFP posted this announcement for a carnival of radical action, as discussed in the previous post.

Sylvia will be taking over the carnival (with a little help from yours truly).

The announcement:

Announcing:

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.

[…]

DEADLINE: MAY 25th
and the carnival will be posted on May 27th.

I’ll be waiting!

You can use the blogcarnival.com submission form that Sylvia set up, or you can submit your contribution via email.

Please let other people know, and contribute something!

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?

For a long time I’ve wondered why I keep getting approached in public by South Asian men, being asked where I’m from, what I study, where I live, etc. Nobody else seems to do it, and street harassment from non-South Asian men tends to be of a less conversational nature, so I always assumed it was about me looking Indian and them being lonely (and assuming that I, as a woman, am gonna be more accommodating than the other South Asian men in the vicinity).

The number of South Asian migrants to Australia is increasing as a proportion of the total immigration intake. Partly, this is fuelled by changes in South Asia (I know that it’s becoming easier for Indians to travel, work, and repatriate money from overseas), partly by changes to the workforce in Australia that have increased the number of short-term immigrants who come to Australia to work. The majority of these immigrants are male.

The area I live in has a large South Asian population. The proximity to the city and availability of decent units are a drawcard. And if the conversation of these South Asian newcomers is anything to go by, there are a fair few newer migrants moving in.

But until I read Annie’s post in Known Turf about being harassed in Delhi by a man claiming to be from Melbourne, I didn’t connect the behaviour of these men to norms within South Asia. The salient quality to me was their desire to find some shred of familiarity with their homeland, which, as a migrant myself, I do understand and have sympathy with. But I’ve always been vaguely baffled by their choice to approach me rather than anyone else, and so kept my irritation with their sense of entitlement to myself.

Knowing the age and background of these men, I can imagine that they’ve absorbed the same norms as men in South Asia who engage in “eve-teasing”. Which isn’t to make some kind of special case out of the sexism of South Asian men — because, like I said, I get harassed by non-South Asian men too — but to point out that it has distinctive characteristics arising from its social circumstances, and that it manifests itself in different ways to other types of sexual harassment.

So, right after reading Annie’s post, I switched over to Sepia Mutiny and read Ennis’ disingenuous dismissal of Richard Gere’s sexual harassment of Shilpa Shetty.

My problem with it isn’t his attack on the prudish morality of the court case being brought against them; my problem is the focus on the overblown sexual morality of the Indian response to the case and the minimising of the sexual harassment involved.

Ennis wrote:

An embrace and a smooch on the cheek is tame compared to stuff in Bollywood lately.[...]

Why not say, I’m sorry you all are offended, I’ll ask him not to do it again, but really it was just a kiss on the cheek. It wasn’t on my lips, and there was no tongue involved. None. Now if you’re done with the lawsuits, I have to get prepared for my sexy Bollywood movie …
[emphasis mine]

So according to Ennis, the non-consensuality and force in the incident are less problematic than the conservative response to it? And it’s okay to paint Shetty as a hypocrite because she makes money from sexually suggestive films?

By removing the issue of consent, Ennis has just played a rhetorical trick that equates sexual harassment with consensual “kissing” — removing the issue of female agency altogether. Male agency defines and constitutes what is sexual, while women’s agency is a non-issue.

Gere and Shetty didn’t “kiss”. Gere manhandled her. She did not consent to it. In fact, she was very uncomfortable during the entire incident.

So defending the incident in a climate where conservative Hindu moralists have made it into an either-or issue (EITHER stand up for Indian autonomy by condemning both Shetty and Gere for their licentiousness OR allow foreign men to plunder “our” women at will), invoking a patriarchal nationalism that has superficial anti-imperialistic connotations, is a bit tough. That’s hardly an excuse.

Buying into this logic means ignoring the sexism of the incident as well as the moralistic response to it. Both responses involve ignoring the fact that a woman’s bodily integrity was violated to produce this “obscene” display.

A comment from an article I read the other day has stuck in my mind all week, and I think it applies here:

culture is structured according to the circulation of women among men according to historically and culturally specific patterns. Feminist critics have highlighted the ways that such “trafficking in women,” to use Gayle Rubin’s term, establishes and institutionalizes the oppression of women.
[...]
In addition to a sex-gender economy that organizes men into social groups through the distribution of women, there is an economy regulating the distribution of women so as to construct and perpetuate racial groupings.
- Gwen Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks‘, in PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 1, Jan. 1995.

The two issues — street harassment and public harassment by celebrities — both tie into this issue, I think. The use of women by men according to logics of capital, race, empire, and “culture”.

Both sides of the dichotomy that have been created by the comments of Judge Gupta are about what kind of sexual economy women are ‘circulated’ within. Evaluation of women’s behaviour in terms of obscenity versus chastity opposes two different systems of sexual ‘circulation’ — one based on patriarchal familial bonds that extend and reproduce the patriarchal family, or one based on male-dominated capitalism in which women’s sexuality is commodified. There’s a certain amount of agency that women have in either system, depending on a variety of things (including their freedom of movement between the two systems), but overall these overlapping systems dominate women.

In the case of street harassment by recent South Asian immigrant men, it’s that they’re treating me, and women like me, as repositories of both exciting sexuality and familiar culture — as inhabiting both the white public world of the labour market, academia, and politics, as well as the private world of hearth and home (in the immigrant context where “culture” is rendered part of the private sphere).

It’s kinda depressing that women going about their business — whether walking home from the train station or addressing a gathering to combat AIDS — are doing that business in spaces overdetermined by patriarchal domination (as well as other kinds of domination). When will our actions, words, thoughts, feelings and bodies be our own?

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