She who stumbles

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

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

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

Love,
Fire Fly

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!

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?

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

Here are the rules of the meme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodnight!

I’ve been lax with my blogging over the past few days because Real Life intervened. I wrote about 3000 words of thesis in 2 days and then family from India came to town.

I’ve been busy busy busy busy and no signs of life slowing down are emerging.

Wiradjuri campaigners at Lake Cowal have also been busy. Along with a Corroboree to celebrate Easter, campaigners are occupying the offices of Barrick Gold to protest the illegal and dangerous gold mine on Wiradjuri lands.

There are also refugees in Villawood immigration detention centre on a hunger strike to protest against a new wave of deportations.

About 60 prisoners at one of Australia’s notorious immigration detention centres launched a hunger strike on March 28 to protest against a new wave of refugee deportations

In the face of massive, life-threatening issues like deportation and cyanide poisoning of indigenous waters, I feel a bit intimidated in expressing the doubts and difficulties of trying to start up an anti-racism collective at my university.
But we have to start somewhere. Hopefully we can start tackling issues around the Block once we kick things off.

I have to organise a reading group to get it all started, but I’m not sure what’s a good starting point. If anyone has any suggestions for a reading (preferably a self-contained chapter from a book, or an article, bonus if it’s available as a PDF), I’d really appreciate it. I want to discuss anti-racist activism broadly, as well as delve into the political/psychic/ontological/material/historical/social dimensions of race.

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

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