She who stumbles

It seems like most bloggers I read are also heavily active in campaigns for political and social change. My own involvement in activism has been so sporadic that I feel like a fraud claiming to be an activist. I’m not nearly experienced enough with activist work to feel entitled to the appellation, although activism is something I desperately want to do.

When I started working on my thesis I strongly believed that theory could be empowering and support social change…. now I’m not so sure. I’m well aware that the class and caste privilege I enjoy underwrites whatever manage to think, understand, or express politically. There are times when I feel that the intellectual pursuits of studying, discussion, and theorising are a waste of my time, and I should be out there working hard for social change. But I’m also well aware of the obstacles to my doing that.

A few weeks ago I went along to a mental illness discussion group at university. Student campaigning around mental illness has been pretty much non-existent, which is something people are addressing now. The discussion was led by a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very nasty experience with the mental health system.

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.

My latest bout of serious depression began in 2003, a few months after the USA invaded Iraq. I was heavily involved in campaigning against the invasion, doing something almost daily, which stirred up a lot of intense emotions. One of those was frustration at the way the campaign was organised.
As an independent activist working with people belonging to socialist parties, I had very little say in campaign strategy. At the same time, I was tokenised as a woman of colour in a white-dominated movement; I was urged to make speeches at rallies and forums, but because I wasn’t part of their organisation I couldn’t contribute at the caucuses where each faction determined how they’d vote. The parties that trumpeted loudly about justice used me personally — they’d assign a member to make friends with me to woo me into their organisation, or at least into voting along party lines. Yet most of the work I did was handing out leaflets and putting up posters.

Ironic that the period of time that I was most heavily involved with politics was also the time when I felt most pressured, alienated and dehumanised. A few months later I was in the grip of some of the most intense lows of my life.

Since then I’ve dallied with the mental health system again, and ultimately rejected it as a means of defining or addressing my mentality.

These are experiences that have led me to really doubt that thinking is such a magnificent thing that ideas can transcend social boundaries and set humanity apart from everything else. Part of my middle class (although not wealthy) upbringing was a belief in the power of good ideas to make a difference, and to overcome material obstacles to their realisation. Like most ideologies, it operates in such a way as to deny its material underpinnings. It underlies a liberal humanist model of agency that marginalises anyone who doesn’t have the means to realise their ideas: women, people of colour, working-class people, peasant-class people, disabled people (including the mentally ill), queer people, trans people, and anyone else whose oppression markedly reduces their ability to access and use resources.

I think mental illness, in some ways more so than race and gender, breaks the liberal humanist model of agency in fundamental ways. Agency, according to the liberal humanist model, is based on rationality, the cornerstone of consciousness. Mental illness is by definition the evacuation of the capacity for rationality in a human being.

Internet discourse about itself holds that the internet is a sphere of pure ideas, where inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. don’t matter. What matters are the quality of your ideas, evaluated by rational minds all made equal by freedom of speech and equal access to the means of communication. In an environment like this, emotions are unnecessary. In many ways, this is the same belief academia has about itself.

Women of colour know it’s different.

Now I’m going to discuss some things that came up in the recent conflicts over Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism. I do not want to discuss the book, and any comments criticising me for my position Re: Valenti or the book are neither welcome nor relevant. I have nothing to say about either of them. I do not read Valenti’s site, Feministing, and I have not read the book. That’s because I live in Australia, where the book is unavailable, and I find Feministing too US-centric to be worth my internet time. I realise how debate about the book has spanned several blogs, posts and threads, but I do NOT want it to be brought here. Comments about it will be edited for irrelevant content.

Moreover, this is a safe space for women of colour to talk about their concerns. Specifically, the way that subtle racism and sexism marginalise us and affect our mental health. Comments that aren’t about this topic will be closely scrutinised.

Recently a number of women of colour have talked about the hurtful effects of internet discourse about this book on them. The ways that woc have been positioned draw on the ideology of the rational liberal humanist agent and relegate the concerns of women of colour to a space outside that model.

The fact that this has been accomplished through doublespeak, contradiction, evasion, and outright ignoring woc doesn’t affect the integrity of the model. By nature, the dualism of the model ensures that criticism mostly travels in one direction, and the material inequalities behind that duality are ignored.

What does this mean for woc?

For activism, it means a lack of discursive space in which to raise concerns and have them addressed.

But discursive spaces reside in minds. Minds which have a personal, emotional, mental, and neurochemical substrate, all of which are affected by discourse. Not having any language or concepts to express one’s concerns leads to a chronic lack of hope. And hopelessness leads to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.

Recently Jenn of Reappropriate and Vox Ex Machina (amongst others) posted about this CNN article on Asian American women’s suicidality. The article takes a social perspective on the relationship between race, gender (although not class or sexuality), and mental illness, subtly bringing to light the inadequacy of individualised models of mental health care which do little to address the needs of Asian American women.

While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. “They felt the counselor couldn’t understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman.”

These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.

This brief quote doesn’t do justice to the resourcefulness of women of colour in dealing with the emotions, and the durable effects of oppression on our mentalities. Leaving behind completely the dualistic model of rational agency, I’ve found that women of colour have much more practical, grounded and holistic ways of conceptualising and dealing with social problems. For women of colour, both political consciousness and personal life are not separate, and it’s not possible to be disinterested or detached from them. Instead, woc have a reflexive and measured understanding of our own lives and can move between high theory and daily practice without compromising ourselves on the grounds of lacking objectivity or rationality.

And by that I mean that we can do, and do do more with our brains than thinking along abstract lines or evaluating evidence according to abstract criteria. For woc, emotions aren’t a sign of intellectual deficiency. They’re a tool for creating social changes that make our lives better. As such, they aren’t outside the realm of what can be worked on progressively. Emotional skills are part of creating social change.

That compares pretty poorly with the ideology of rationalist supremacy, by which I thought I could defeat my demons with good ideas.

For me, my depression transformed after I started the reading for my thesis. Being able to critically evaluate the reasons I’ve been made miserable by other people through a lens of race has helped my self-esteem and sense of myself in the world. And in that time I’ve rigorously rejected the individualistic models of mental illness that the mental health system produces by re-evaluating how certain experiences I’d had in the mental health system were indicative of a kind of violence done to people to make them fit into therapeutic models.

When I was young I went to an extremely racist school. Unfortunately, it was also a very small school. Racist slurs were de rigueur — children have a habit of picking up on any difference and bring rather nasty about it. But the school administration and the mental health system were complicit in that racism. It’s not only that experiences of racist ostracism were ignored by the counsellors and therapists years later, but that counsellors were called in to assess me while it was happening — because I was being disruptive — while the bullies were left untouched.
Later, when I was a day patient at a youth psychiatric centre, another patient — a loud boy who had an anxiety disorder — called me a “curry muncher” and I was assigned to an anxiety therapy group (with the same boy) when I lost it and yelled at him for it. The reason his comment was problematic wasn’t, as the (all white) psych nurses framed it, because it hurt my feelings. It was problematic because it underscored the racial and cultural alienation I felt in Australian society, and the double shame — of being brown among whites, and of being mentally ill amongst Indian people — that caused me.

To be fair, the mental health system isn’t as vested in a model of rational agency as other parts of society. But it has its own models of pathology that marginalise the concerns of women of colour and do violence to them (through aggressive medication that saps the capacity to act, and by restraining and restricting freedom of movement and association).

The disempowering effects of the mental health system compounded my depression, leaving me unable to confront the challenges I needed to meet in the past few years. I called it “activist burnout” but that was just one of many things that combined to make me nigh useless for two and a half years.
And because of that long hiatus from activism I don’t have the experience I need to fulfil all the responsibilities I’m taking on in my new activist projects.

But even though I feel so negatively about the mental health system, I still feel ashamed about my mental illness (which is why it’s taken me months to finish this post!). Because I’ve rejected the models of the mental health system, I don’t have clear guidelines on how to judge my capacities to deal with stress or get work done. Activism involves tensions and exhilarations that overwhelm me, and just the emotional rollercoaster could lead to mental exhaustion and depression. I’ve had to abandon easy, predetermined answers to my problems for a process of groping around in the dark to get my bearings (let alone navigating with success). This is possibly why I write about this topic so much!

Although I’m combating the elitist ideology that all problems can be fixed with good ideas, it’s good ideas that have helped me feel more empowered; it’s the ideas of women of colour that have supported me and inspired me to get to work on the anti-racism collective. While the doctrinaire belief of Trotskyists that a final revolution will solve all the problems of the world, ever, fuelled my passion for activism before, now it’s the practical relationship-building skills that women of colour have fostered that are helping me the most.

That’s why I read the blogs I do, and am doing the things I’m doing. And, selfishly, why I wanted to start the carnival. Because I’m learning from amazing people and we can change the world.

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?

Just as I was lamenting the irrelevance of my blog to my mostly-American audience…

Immigration minister Kevin Andrews denied Snoop Dogg a travel visa to enter the country to perform at the MTV Awards ceremony. While I’m no fan of the guy and I’ve sheltered myself so successfuly from the vicissitudes of pop culture that I couldn’t even name a song of his, I still think this has to do with race.

In a situation where we have the American military coming into Australia for training exercises in less than a month’s time, and Bush himself coming to town later this year (while the whole goddamn city is being shut down for him, BTW), I think some “drug and gun offences” look pretty fucking trivial.

It’s this whole drive to individualise moral culpability and evade the issue of power that’s really outrageous about this. While a high-profile black American rapper whose audience is mostly white, whose wealth is built upon a skewed portrayal of black men, which again benefits wealthy white Americans (and was indeed constructed to do so) is made out to be personally degenerate for embodying elements of a culture that has both been socially engineered and lambasted, the whole fucking country is getting ready to hold an orgy in celebration of war and capitalism.

I know who I’d rather bar from the country and it’s not the rapper.

EDIT: Now the PM is comparing his behaviour to Holocaust denial and making comments about his “background”.

from the Guardian Unlimited:

Australia and the United States have signed an agreement to exchange a few hundred refugees held at island detention camps in an effort by both governments to discourage future asylum seekers, Australian officials said Wednesday.

from The Age, Melbourne:

Refugee advocates have expressed outrage at a plan to swap asylum seekers intercepted en route to Australia with those detained while trying to enter the United States, describing the scheme as a “dark and murky” political fix.

Under the new refugee exchange scheme announced by Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, asylum seekers detained on Nauru would be taken to the US and Cuban refugees held at Guantanamo Bay would be resettled in Australia.

While commentators and politicians debate over whether this will “deter” or “attract” more refugees (as if refugees are rats in mazes), the bigger picture — of how this is about the Australian nation-state — is being lost. As many indigenous Australians have pointed out, debates within white Australia about who’s “allowed” into the country actually have the effect of undermining indigenous sovereignty. They’re about consolidating the rule of an elite by skewing the terms of engagement over these issues into ones of paternalistic responsibility, or realpolitik.

The actual political costs and benefits to be wrung from these peoples’ lives aren’t being measured by the numerous editorials and opinions floating around. It’s not just about the upcoming election; it’s about white Australia’s entitlement to steal peoples’ sovereignty, both within the Australian territory and in the Pacific. It’s about the nation-state constituting itself as a deputy sheriff in the Pacific, getting power by tacking itself onto the USA. It’s about state power making itself more important than people.

tionFrom the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ban HIV-positive migrants: PM

HIV-positive people should be denied entry to Australia as migrants or refugees, Prime Minister John Howard says.While saying he would like “more counsel” on the issue, Mr Howard said HIV positive people should not be allowed to migrate to Australia.

“My initial reaction is no (they should not be allowed in),” he told Southern Cross Broadcasting.

“There may be some humanitarian considerations that could temper that in certain cases but prima facie - no.”

More coverage:

• BBC on how the restrictions compare to those around the world,
• and AIDS organisations say the figures for HIV-positive immigrants are misleading.

Given that HIV infection is spreading fastest in the third world, isn’t this just another way for the first world to keep out people of colour?