She who stumbles

A number of things in the news have been upsetting me this week for their sexist, oppressive nature and the potential consequences for women generally, and women of colour in particular. I’m going to write about the ones which got the least attention from the blogosphere first.

1. A rape charge against rugby player Anthony Laffranchi has been dropped because there was “no direct evidence of lack of consent”

Needless to say, this is fucking appalling. A woman who was so drunk that police “estimated her blood alcohol content at the time she arrived at the apartment at between 0.145 and 0.168 - a level at which most social drinkers would be “in a stupor and may be unconscious”" can not be said to be in a fit state to give “consent” to sex*, and if she says so after the fact then she should be believed. I’d say that her choice to go ahead with charging and prosecuting the assaulter speaks to a sense of believing this, but of course her voice is completely silenced in all the reporting about the case.

The disturbing thing about the magistrate’s decision is that it takes the capacity to withhold or withdraw consent completely out of the hands of the woman. Unless there’s “evidence” that she did not consent, it’s assumed that she did, or at least the outcome is the same as if she did. And because she got drunk, her testimony is positioned as inherently unreliable, so that the actual act that’s being punished is getting drunk, rather than rape. Hear that women? “If you’re gonna get raped, don’t get drunk first. Rape is your own fault, and you invite it if you get drunk. Don’t expect anyone to care if you’re drunk and raped. P.S. Men: you can rape all the drunk women you like!”

I’m also really sick of female judges and magistrates who punish other women who are raped. Again, proof that professional feminism/liberal feminism does not work.

I’d also say that it’s a clear case of why a “Yes Means Yes” approach to consent doesn’t work either. When the power to give consent, to withhold consent, and to withdraw consent once it’s given, is out of the hands of women, then exploring the hows and whys of women’s choices to consent to sex is inherently limited. Instead, perhaps what should be explored is how to convince the law (especially white female judges) that “no means no,” since it seems to have a really hard time with that concept. Or even how to dismantle rape culture altogether, since this entire disempowering framing of consent seems to be a key element of it.

* This is not to say that all women who get drunk and have sex are actually raped. I want to challenge the notion that women who combine alcohol and sexual activity shouldn’t be believed when they say they’ve been raped. Because the notion of an unreliable drunken woman is such blatantly slut-shaming one that it endangers the capacity of women to enjoy sex, of the drunken variety or otherwise.

2. Noellee Mowatt, a 19-year-old immigrant woman from Jamaica, was jailed in Canada because she refused to testify against her partner, who allegedly abused her

Credit for this story goes to Aaminah Hernández, Professor Black Woman and Ilyka Damen.

Earlier this month it was revealed that Noellee Mowatt was jailed under a law generally reserved for gang members who don’t testify against collaborators because she refused to testify against her boyfriend, who she alleged was abusing her. “Mowatt told the court she made the abuse statement after Toronto police Det.-Const. Mandy Morris threatened to “lock her up” for public mischief if she didn’t corroborate the 911 call.”

She says:

“I only made a mistake by calling the cops,”

“This is what I get. … I’m never calling the police again – even if I’m dying, I’m not going to call them.”

She has since testified that she made up all reports of abuse, and that the bruises and abrasions she had were self-inflicted. She said that she made up the allegations to punish her boyfriend, who kicked her out of their apartment after an argument.

Mowatt seems to have no source of support in Canada other than her boyfriend. Her mother and 2-year-old daughter are in Jamaica, and her father, who she moved to Canada to live with, died last year. She was living in shelters and a boarding house in the months before she was arrested.

And it turns out that Christopher Harbin, her boyfriend, was already in breach of the conditions of his probation for a previous domestic violence charge.

Now, the Toronto Children’s Aid Society is planning to take custody of her child because of “her inability to be able to offer proper care to the child when the child is born, and one of the factors is the domestic violence situation surrounding her circumstances”. Yet neither Ms. Mowatt nor her lawyer heard anything about this.

I’m completely shocked and appalled by the way the entire policing and legal system have handled this case, and the dehumanising media reporting about it. Each self-righteous attempt to “help” seems to have been designed to coerce Noellee Mowatt into behaving in an appropriately “victimised” way. Which is to say: having no will of her own, no sense of her own prospects for survival and presenting no challenge to the restrictive attempts to aid her. There’s also a complete lack of any reporting on her circumstances since emigrating from Jamaica, or how her race and nationality shaped her choices about work, family, or her safety and that of her child. She may have made up the testimony, and she may be clumsy, but the erasure of her agency seems to be the worst aspect of the entire scenario.

3. The implicit racism of singling out and homogenising the voices of people of colour in a protest situation

BlackAmazon has talked about this repeatedly:

TO mention your name once and magically turn you into women of color while expressing sympathy for people who flat out made you cry. To turn one SINGULAR you into this monolithic beast as if the people who agreed with you couldn’t possibly be diverse interested in their own realities but some side that is being ‘counterproductive” and not ACTUALLY wounded?

The phenomenon whereby the blackness of a person who is vocal and vehement in their protest at something is singled out as “colouring” that action as racial, and is used a sort of code to delegitimise the concerns raised by the protest action, is something I’ve noticed in the past with regard to social movements.

For instance, in an action taken in October last year to oppose the nexus of mining interests and dispossession of Aboriginal people by the Northern Territory intervention, the protest was branded as “violent” (because an old white man was scratched by a placard) and one of the few Aboriginal people who was there was depicted as “the most vocal of the protesters”.

Now, having been at the action myself, and helping to organise it, I know that it ended up having very little to do with the Northern Territory intervention at all. It was actually meant to be a protest in solidarity with women in the Territory who were protesting the intervention. Environmental activists who were involved with organising suggested protesting the Australian Nuclear Association conference, and invited speakers who hardly said anything about the intervention. The linking of “violence” to Aboriginality (when in fact many older white men were shouting in the faces of younger women) in this case, without any reference to the actual politics of Aboriginal resistance to the nuclear industry (which has a long history in Australia), is blatantly racist.

But white activists never do anything about it. Often they do the reverse, claiming legitimacy with other activists because of the involvement of people of colour.

It plays into a protest dynamic whereby many people of colour at protest are put in unsafe situations because of the actions taken by white protesters. For instance, a Persian friend of mine was called a “terrorist” for starting a chant in a heavily-policed protest situation, when it’s widely known that ASIO have been monitoring her. This is a rather extreme example, but it highlights something I want to bring up, which is the privilege inherent in some kinds of action being taken by white protesters. While we’re on the subject of people of colour distrusting police, it really needs to be said that there’s an uneven distribution of risks across racial lines in a protest situation. White activists deciding that certain types of action are appropriate and not taking into account how they affect people of colour differentially is a huge problem which I think needs to be addressed.
I really wish I could link to the great discussions of this issue at Brownfemipower’s blog, but of course it’s been shut down.

Delegitimising a protest through racialising and homogenising its interlocutors is something that Hugo Schwyzer, a self-proclaimed “pro-feminist man” has done repeatedly:
“Certain radical women of color bloggers (RWOC) are accusing…”
“…my critics in the “feminist/womanists of color” blogosphere…”
“Many of the prominent “women of color” bloggers in the feminist blogosphere clearly don’t read my blog regularly.”
This is while many white feminists were raising the same issues.

He’s by no means unique in this respect, and I bring his posts up as examples illustrating a more general point rather than to represent him as The Bastion of Race-baiting in the “feminist” blogosphere. I have no desire whatsoever to start any kind of argument with him about this (and he’ll probably ignore this anyway, since he’s never ever answered me before). Certainly there are white women who make the same mistake, invoking “women of colour” as a homogeneous batch in an affirming way, which tends to play into a logic of “best ally in the room” by oversimplifying race issues.

Ultimately, I’m writing about this as a consciousness-raising exercise. I would like to see more white “allies” discussing this, and perhaps keeping it in their awareness when they organise, write, and interact around issues of race, with an view to avoiding, overcoming or dealing with it.

4. A bunch of geeks get together at a convention, and initiate what they call an “Open Source Boob Project” (OSBP), in which women are offered badges that designate whether they would welcome having their breasts groped or not

There have been many, many analyses of this already, so I won’t offer any more. There are some good round-ups of the posts about the subject, including one at Hoyden About Town, and one by a woman who participated in the original situation. I haven’t had time to read through all the posts and comments, but I wanted to add my own take on it. I have to say that my opinion of it was heavily influenced by this post by Springheel Jack (through skywardprodigal), which was pretty much the first I heard of it. I also want to point out the unspoken whiteness of both the original ‘project’ and a lot of the feminist and feminist-inspired criticism of it, which Delux Vivens has outlined.

Stuff like the OSBP is why I absolutely hate “geek culture”.

What I want to talk about, instead, is a personal experience of a party where there was a similar level of sexual liberality, initiated by a group of men and one or two women. It was a costume party where skinny white women played on sexual stereotypes to get men’s attention, which eventually ended in one woman offering to strip in exchange for a lift, while a group of men looked on. This was while I was ignored in a corner by those men, who I’d known longer than this white woman, and assumed I was friends with them. Funnily enough, it was at this party that I declared “patriarchy ruins everything” and was met with jokes about how it’s great cos it benefits men.

Now, I don’t hold it against any woman who strips in exchange for anything. I felt kind of uncomfortable with passing judgement on this behaviour because I felt I might be slut-shaming. I realised, though, that my problem wasn’t with anyone’s behaviour in particular, but the uncomfortable dynamics whereby “winners” and “losers” are created in a sexualised economy. I did feel that as soon as sex became a currency by which women got attention from men, I was on the “losing” team because I didn’t want to play.

As a woman of colour who was told repeatedly when I was young that brown is unalterably ugly and undesirable, I have a bit of a complex about this. There are two extreme sets of stereotypes that woc can fall into: the asexual hard worker, and the oversexed ‘whore’. I think they play off each other, because they’re predicated on erasing a woman of colour’s capacity to negotiate both meaningful work and sex. A lot of the suspicion around the work of woc revolves around a suspicion of the sexuality of woc. The agency of woc is never recognised outside its sexual dimension, rendering the sexuality of woc one-dimensional, and erasing the reflective, reasoned decision-making capacities that go into work.
I’ve felt pressured to perform either, or both, stereotypes in order to get recognition, depending on the situation. The alternative would be to disappear altogether. “Geek culture” has its own roles for woc to play, often as the ‘whore’, since it is by definition a leisure/hobby culture. Often, the sexism of this culture lies in reifying women’s sexuality which is especially harsh on woc. The result has been that I have at times felt that my sexuality is out of my own control.

Clearly, valorising women when their sexuality falls into a set of predetermined outcomes has its own inequality built into it, since it reduces socialising into a two-dimensional space.

I think it relates to capitalism, and the creation of value. (I’m getting all Marxist on your arses because I’m studying it right now.) Without going into elaborate detail, I think the Marxist notion of labour markets involving an unequal exchange is really important here, as well as the notion of a homogenisation of values across a commodity-producing sector. Capitalism rewards some workers over others, for producing things which are more conducive to its interests, in similar ways that patriarchy rewards women who comply with its interests (and of course, these are interconnected systems). It tends to mean a reproduction of those modes of activity over any given social space. I.e. women’s sexuality is homogenised into a set of repetitive forms — stereotypes.

But it doesn’t mean that women who do take up those positions of privilege are inherently bad for doing so, or that the solution — as some feminist strategies would have it — is to refuse those positions. ‘Reforming’ them is obviously rather problematic, since that process will be exploitative and unjust. The solution is for all women to organise together to work against the oppressive conditions faced by women, in all their different forms. And this is what women of colour seek when becoming involved in the women’s movement — it’s not about “jealousy” of white women’s privileges, or ressentiment towards them. Obviously this is an idealisation of the women’s movement(s), but I do want to outline an ideal here without compromising an oppositional stance towards the multiple forms of injustice that women face.

… so I guess what I mean when I sometimes tell male friends that they wouldn’t understand something because they’re men (which one friend tried to argue was “abusive”), I really have a point. There are so many things which are poorly understood in our society, but the “poor understanding” actually produces false forms of knowledge that are predicated on reproducing racist and sexist stereotypes which leave huge gaps in understanding. I write in this blog to sort those gaps out.

So the Chaser guys have outdone themselves and are clearly desperate for laughs, because now they’re not only content to exploit Muslims, they’ve broken out the boot polish and actually gone for full blackface.

Who would’ve thought that some middle class white guys doing sketch comedy could be so unoriginal!?!

I can’t embed the video but it’s here on the ABC’s website, and is this week’s default video. You can also download the whole episode from the ABC site.

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 Sydney Morning Herald

WHEN David Williams’s uncle returned from the Korean War - exhausted and recovering from a gunshot wound - the family took him to Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane. The door was closed in their faces.”They basically said, ‘Just another black coon’,” Mr Williams said. “They didn’t want to know us. The fact that he fought for his country - nearly died for his country - didn’t mean anything to them.

“They left him to look after himself and he ended up hitting the booze and just slowly deteriorating.”

This was not an isolated experience. About 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders fought in World War I and as many as 5000 took part in World War II, according to Australian War Memorial records.

But while they fought alongside other Australians in the trenches, on the battlefields of Europe and in the jungles of Asia, those who made it back often received little or no recognition of their efforts and continued to face racism at home.

Next Wednesday, despite criticism from the RSL, their unique experiences and contribution will be recognised when hundreds of indigenous veterans and their descendants march through Redfern in Sydney’s first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anzac Day parade.

The RSL is an extremely conservative organisation. They’ve taken many anti-queer stances in the past. It’s hardly surprising that they’re opposing this effort to recognise indigenous soldiers (and subtly undo the image of white masculinity that’s celebrated as quintessentially “Australian” on ANZAC Day). Because of course, so long as white Australians get recognised, everyone else is unimportant!

Why isn’t Alan Jones being lambasted like Don Imus?

Dom Knight, of the Sydney Morning Herald blog thinks he knows why.

Honestly, I’m not impressed with his analysis.

These two stories about multi-millionaire white broadcasters exercising appalling judgement when talking about minorities, though, say a great deal about each society.America is hypersensitive on the subject of race. I guess a legacy of slavery will do that to you – although a legacy of genocide doesn’t seem to have achieved the same result in Australia.

Um, what about the American legacy of genocide?

I think it was the work of black activists who’ve worked consistently over decades to push an anti-racist agenda, not the harried conscience of white broadcasting authorities or ad execs.

We haven’t had a movement with the kind of momentum of the anti-racist movement in the USA because we’re a much smaller country and the indigenous rights movements have focused around legal reform, suffrage, land rights, health, housing, etc.

By contrast, anti-racist movements by people of colour have been few and small. Although the post-invasion history of Australia does feature non-indigenous people of colour, those people were deliberately kept outside formal politics and weren’t numerous enough to force anti-racism onto the political agenda.

Since multiculturalism became the official policy, however, most ‘leadership’ in ‘ethnic communities’ is heavily mediated by the state. State funding and agencies underwrite most political activity by community groups, and they are made accountable to state agencies for that funding.

So what we’ve seen is a polarisation and depoliticisation of the terms of debate around race, with right wing media personalities and politicians talking about “getting tough” and having no time for “political correctness”, while left wing activists are left with this soft-centred discourse of “culture” and “tolerance” that doesn’t address the inequalities and injustices that underpin racism.

It’s really difficult for coalitions to form around these issues too, because communities are so besieged.

That’s why the response to Jones was to reassert the racist norm rather than “go[ing] completely overboard, American-style” and ousting the fucker. We don’t have the cultural or political tools to make that happen.

And that’s why Knight’s complacency and white-centrism will only usher in more of Jones-style hate speech.

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?

I have a bajillion things to blog about, but this is something I can do quickly, in between everything else (non-bloggy) I need to do.

Has anyone else seen these ads around? They’re for V, apparently to release a new flavour.

APPARENTLY IT’S FUNNY TO MAKE JOKES ABOUT MYTHS THAT LED TO GENOCIDE NOW. FFS!!!!

THERE ARE NO WORDS.

I posted a message to the V message board, but who knows if they’ll even notice it. It’s not like I was a customer, just a passerby put off by the offensive visual pollution.

EDIT: I sent this message to them via the contact form.

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to express outrage over the new poster advertisements I have seen around Sydney.

They are offensively racist. They rely on a disgusting stereotype of people of colour as cannibals, and valorise white peoples’ “exploration” of remote regions. These are stereotypes which have been used to justify genocide and exploitation on a hideous scale. See for example Michael Taussig’s work on the use of this myth by brutal colonial regimes to inflict horrendous violence upon indigenous peoples.

Your rendering of this myth as a humorous anthropomorphism of energy drink cans is a joke at the expense of people against whom genocide was committed in the name of this myth. This both exploits the pain of these people and renders their suffering invisible and ridiculous. It is inhumane.

I would suggest you withdraw the poster.

Who knows if it’ll achieve anything, but at least it’s not addressed to the marketing exercise message board.

So the Australian Communications and Media Authority have finally (a year and a half later!) condescended to determining that Alan Jones* made remarks before the Cronulla riot that encouraged violence against “Middle Eastern” Australians (well, there were Bangladeshi, Thai, and Greek people assaulted that day too, but nobody cares about that, do they?). Does the fact that David Marr wrote about it days after the riot happened make any difference to anyone?

What the fuck do these people think they’re playing at?!?

* Prominent right-wing talkback radio personality in Sydney. He’s been brought up on several fraud and hate speech charges but still manages to connive his way out.

EDIT: Jones is on the defensive, with the backing of the Prime Minister. “Permission to hate” indeed. Ugh.

from BBC World News:

Dozens of young women from a religious school in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, have broken into an alleged brothel and kidnapped the owner.

The women, from the nearby Jamia Hafsa madrassa, burst in late on Tuesday, demanding the premises be shut down.

The women say they have a right to end immoral activity under Islamic law.

There are so many things going on in this piece that I’m not sure where to start.

What strikes me is:

1. That women are at the centre of it, not men.
2. The implications it might have for white Western feminists, in reinforcing or repudiating Orientalist sensibilities towards women of colour (especially Muslim women).
3. What the Western “sex positive” and “anti-porn” feminist camps will make of it, as it falls outside the traditional (i.e. Western) scope of either movement.
4. That it’s been beaten up by Western media who talk about “Talibanisation” as if it meant “more terrorists” and therefore “Pakistan is next on the list, after Iran”.

I’m a bit too scatterbrained to formulate coherent thoughts about Western feminism, patriarchy and imperialism right now, but I do think there’s a lot to be said about it. Point #4 is the most obviously objectionable, I think, while the complex interconnections between gender, religion, and empire leave it all a bit more ambiguous.

I think it’s really important to remember that what we think of as political might have completely different dimensions in other societies. Our own priorities may not be integral for justice or change elsewhere.

The talk of the town over the past week has been the arrest of five activists on charges related to protests against the G20 summit in Melbourne, last November. Although there were arrests soon after the protests, this swoop on five homes and arrests by the ‘Police Terrorism Information Squad’ has people talking because of the severity of the charges, and the involvement of an anti-terror police unit.

The organisation targeted by police is known as the Arterial Bloc. In response to unprecedented levels of forceful policing, the AB used tactics unprecedented in Australian protest: they covered their faces to stop themselves being identified, and they used direct action, pushing through barricades and damaging one police van in an attempt to push through five lines of police. These actions got them harshly criticised from within the activist community, but the buck doesn’t stop there.

In response, police set up a task force, called Operation Salver, which used video footage and photographs of the protest to identify protesters. Rumour has it that they’ve also been watching communication on the internet.

Some of the people arrested on Tuesday morning were people I know. So people, especially people in the local activist community, are all abuzz about this latest development. And me, I’m scared.

The rumour that ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Aussie equivalent of the CIA) has been infiltrating campuses has even made it into the pages of one of the more conservative broadsheets, the Sydney Morning Herald. The other major rumour — that some of the arrestees weren’t even in Melbourne at the time, and that the police have just gone after anyone affiliated with anarchist organisations, doesn’t seem to be getting much news time. Why would it? It’d challenge the legitimacy of the state that gives the press its privileges.

The fact that videos and photographs were used by Taskforce Salver really does bring home the truth of how repressive the collusion between the state and news media really is. Why does the government need to use propaganda, when large private organisations organise, produce, and pay for it? All it needs to do, really, is put on a state funeral for its owners now and then (as well as pass legislation to enable further centralisation of media ownership), and they’re set.

Sarcasm aside, this conflation of protest and terror (when it was the police and the state that shut down the Melbourne CBD for a corporate summit), of military and police, can only be repressive. It’s a crackdown on all forms of challenge to the state and the capitalism it supports. More than anything, it’s actions like these which have characterised the consolidation of political regimes that terrorised their citizens.

I, for one, am terrified.