Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Critical Discourse Analysis

I've been reading van Dijk's description of CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis), a form of "politically committed" linguistic research, aimed at "resisting social inequality". I'm realising that academics who "do" CDA are also performing a particular identity, one that is imbued with moral rectitude, and are attached to self-identifying as "dissident" (van Dijk's own word).

I find this kinda problematic because I don't want to be forever "dissident", I actually want the world to change in the direction of my ideological commitments. Despite declaring "solidarity and cooperation with dominated groups", CDA analysts are paradoxically complicit in reifying the position of the "dominated," and their own position as the "good" supporters of the dominated.

Perhaps I don't have a sufficiently convincing argument on this point, perhaps I have merely a collection of anecdotes and reflections. But one telling point is a footnote: "Space limitations prevent discussion of ... how dominated groups discursively challenge or resist the control of powerful groups." ... Ah, yes those perpetual "space limitations" that mean that "dominated groups", as always, are not accorded discursive space. That, surely, is perpetuating the problem?? As Said (quoting Marx) put it so well in Orientalism: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." CDA continues this veritable tradition of constructing oneself as benevolent, well-disposed towards those "dominated groups" while continuing to take up space - which is itself a form of "domination"!

language, polysemy and disambiguation

So, I've been reading Richard Dyer's brilliant book White. He writes so much that is useful to what I'm doing, but what I want to flag here is his idea (contra my most recent post) that race has historically been constructed as "the conflation of body and temperament" (1997:18) - that is, it hasn't just been understood as a physicality, it has been imbued with meaning in regards to personal qualities too. I think my taxonomy still holds, though, it's just that today, we are encouraged to talk about "cultural diversity" as a euphemism for race, and this is meant, somehow, to be colour-blind.

Anyway, the other thing that's been on my mind is the way in which so many of the words I want to use specifically to disambiguate between physicality and personality are actually polysemously related to both. E.g:
(i) pathological: I wanted to refer to mental distress as being constructed as biological (by Beyond Blue and co.), and thus removed from any sense of personal failure. I wanted to use the term "de-pathologized" to mean that mentally distressed people are (re)defined as ill rather than personally flawed. I mean, for example, the way the term pathological is used in phrases like "pathological liar" or "pathologically late". Well, then, I examined the term pathological and realised it is used in a medical sense to describe disease - that is, pathology is inherently about biology! AAARGH! This ambiguity that I want to draw attention to is embedded in the very polysemic nature (ie multiple meanings) of the word pathological - it can refer to both biology and personality, albeit in different contexts.
(ii) similarly, I am still seeking a word to contrast with physicality in my 4-way grid. I've considered personality, temperament, disposition, character, affiliation ... the problem is largely that I want a word that makes sense both for individual personal traits and collective affiliational traits. I thought maybe temperament could be a good option, since that's what Dyer used in the quote above. But then, Wiki tells me this:
Temperament is defined as that part of the personality which is genetically based. Along with character, and those aspects acquired through learning, the two together are said to constitute personality. (from entry on Temperament, accessed today)
I keep finding terms that have been used by psychology or psychiatry or medicine in ways that biologise concepts that are also commonly understood in other ways.

Ok, that's all for now :>

Thursday, November 15, 2007

re-evaluating non-normative behaviour/identities

OK, so it's been forever since I wrote, but there has been some progress!

I'm working through an idea about categories of stigma (or devalued difference, or non-normativity), based on Erving Goffman's seminal work Stigma (1963).

My theory is that different types of stigma can be categorized, as being one of:
*individual-physical (e.g. depression, if it's understood as chemical imbalance in the brain)
*individual-dispositional (e.g. criminal behaviour, if it's understood as bad behaviour)
*collective-physical (e.g. "racial" characteristics, or congenital deafness)
*collective-dispositional (e.g. political beliefs, religious affiliations, cultural affiliations)
So, I arrange this in a 4-way grid (which I can't construct on this blog, but you get the idea)

My theory is that advocates for particular "devalued identity groups" (for want of a better term) try to "position" behaviours/identities in either the individual-physical quadrant, or in the collective-dispositional quadrant. These two quadrants, I argue are where positive valuation of an identity/behaviour is most often attributable, and I call this a form of "rehabilitation" of particular identities.

So, for example, we get anti-stigma campaigns around mental illness (e.g. Beyond Blue) arguing that depression is an illness, a chemical imbalance in the brain (and therefore individual-physical). This understanding contrasts with Goffman, for whom mental illness was categorizable as a "blemish of individual character" (and therefore individual-dispositional). Argualy, there's still the potential today for depressive behaviour to be understood as dispositional (e.g. someone is just 'lazy', 'grumpy', 'selfish', 'unmotivated', etc). I interpret contemporary anti-stigma campaigns as pro-actively countering such a potential understanding, and (re)positioning depression in the individual-physical domain.

Conversely, discourses of "cultural diversity" position "race" within discourses of "culture",. This arguably (re)positions what could be understood as a biological/physical characteristic, as a dispositional characteristic. (In my interpretation of Goffman, he positions race as collective-physical).

Contemporary understandings of homosexuality are interesting because it is sometimes biologized (e.g. the gay gene), and hence located as individual-physical, and sometimes politically/collectively understood (e.g. the woman-identified woman of lesbian feminism, the socially constructed non-normative sexualities of queer theory). Arguably, these latter conceptions are collective-dispositional. Goffman's understanding of homosexuality , like mental illness, would be described as individual-dispositional; in his time it was both criminal and pathological.

And here's where I see the most interesting link to today: there are forms of deviant behaviour that still today understandable as individual-dispositional - prototypically due to either bad character (as evidenced by criminality or other anti-social behaviour or psychopathological irrationality, and I mean here pathological not in the technical sense of disease, but in the folk sense of "bad in the head"). Now of course, there are intellectual/political understandings that challenge these characterisations (e.g. esp. in the field of criminology!), but I strongly believe that these two categories are the prototypical examples of what I call "unrehabilitated" identity.

The texts that I am looking at often distance their particular, "rehabilitable" identity from these categories, e.g.
-asylum seekers are described as "not criminal"
-depression is described as biological (and hence not "pathologically bad")

Conversely, a behaviour/identity can be discredited by (re)positioning it as individual-dispositional e.g. the G20 protesters are framed as (individual) criminals, rather than political dissidents acting collectively. Finally, there are also some dissenters/outsiders who valorize their individual-dispositional "badness" e.g. the "outlaw", the "queer radical," etc.

What do you think??

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Who is the Other?

I just realised now that the Other as a concept can be prominalised as either "you" or "them." This differential pronominalisation has massive consequences for the ethical relationship between the Self and Other.

If the relationship is "you and me/us," then there is a connection, a dialogue, arguably an ethical relationship. This is a relationship between two subjectivities.

By contrast, if the relationship is "them and me/us," this is an objectifying relationship, one that does not entail dialogue, relationship or connection.

I read the following passage in an article I was reading for my thesis (Riggins, 'The rhetoric of Othering'): "Self and external Other may be understood as unique individuals (I and You) or as collectives that are thought to share similar characteristics (We and They)." I think Riggins here is trying to contrast the idea of individuals vs collectives (singular vs plural), but in shifting from the singular to the plural, he also changed person - from second to third. This slippage seems remarkable to me, but is perhaps common.

I wonder if this has a relationship with how people perceive Others - like you know how prejudiced people sometimes individualise the specific Others that they know, in contrast to the amorphous Them? So for example, you get sentiments like "I don't like Asians, I know Michael is Asian, but he's different to the rest of them" or "Homosexuals are such and such, but Jane is OK."

I've been thinking for a while now that part of the process of de-Othering is establishing relationships of dialogue, changing "us/them" relationships into "us/you."

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

timetabling my life

For the past fortnight, I've been time-tabling my time on study days (Monday-Friday). It was something I've known for a while would help to increase my productivity, but at a cost of sponteneity and a sense of freedom. I used to do it in the later years of high school, and it worked well, but meant that I wasn't very spontaneous or social. So for several months I resisted the idea of getting back into that way of being. But I realised that a lack of structure also had its own associated stresses for me - ironically, I was increasingly coming to feel like I had no control over my time, because every minute could be thesis time! And, my notes and texts and forms were all getting jumbled on my desk, and it was all seeming to get more and more out of control.

I think the main problem is that I LOVE to read, and I LOVE to garden, and I LOVE to make things, and I LOVE to hang out with my loved ones, ... well the point here is that there are many things that I love, and they could theoretically fill all my time. But doing a Phd also involves things that are less fun, like writing up my notes (way less interesting than reading new material), organising my materials (again, less interesting than other stuff), etc. So, some things simply weren't getting done - there was always something more fun to do.

I was getting stressed, though, cos these "unfinished" things were all mentally filed away somewhere in my head as "things I should have done." It's like that some people can work quite happily like that, either getting through with a degree of disorganisation, or just knowing how to work things out for themselves. But it was driving me nuts!

So I've been experimenting with making lists every morning (what a treat! I LOVE making lists! ticking things off is such a delight!), dividing up my time, usually with a few hours of unstructured time (before 9, around lunch and early evening) to do whatever I please. That allows me a degree of sponteneity, and if something comes up during "work" time, I have some flexibility to shift time around. And, I take notes at the end of each day on how my timetabling worked out in practice (e.g. "Need a full half-hour to get ready for and then get to pilates;" "needed two-hour block, not one-hour block, for writing", etc).

It's working so far. I feel like I have MORE time to do what I want. Which is cool. We'll see if after a while it feels draconian or imprisoning. But I'm definitely getting more work done and my stress levels are way better, so that's it's thumbs up so far.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

territorial propriety

Rey Chow, an American cultural theorist with roots in Hong Kong, writes that she speaks from a position as someone who does "not have claims to territorial propriety or cultural centrality." I'd never really thought about the spatial nature of cultural marginality before.

But when I think about it, I recognise this in myself as a queer, and in the context of disability too. For example, one of my texts claims "this is our community" referring to disabled people; but in doing so, the text reflects the fact that this could be doubted; it's kinda like John Howard (was it?) declaring to a room of Greek-Australians that "I see before me Australians". Like anyone else present doubted this??

Historically, disabled people have been socially excluded spatially, like non-Anglos have been, internally contained in institutions, and prevented from entering the country through immigration policies (that continue to this day to specifically exclude disabled people as potential migrants).

It's less clear how queers are spatially excluded. As a queer, I read in the papers today that Howard continues to assert that people in same-sex relationships should not have equal rights as de facto heteros; Romana the queer officer at UMPA wrote a great article in the recent UMPA mag about how queers are excluded on campus through the heteronormativity of the environment- that is, even where homophobia isn't as overt as Howard wishes it were, there is an exclusion through a lack of visibility, or overt inclusion.

By the way, as a complete aside, one of the women in a reading group I'm in said yesterday that the Vietnamese expression for "Vietnamese-Australian" is "Australian with roots in Vietnam". Isn't that interesting? I think it conveys a relationship with Vietnam and Vietnamese identity that is quite different from the essentialising expression "Vietnamese-Australian."

reading in a beautiful place

was just thinking this morning that one of my greatest pleasures in life is reading something intellectually stimulating and personally grounded, while enjoying a beautiful physical location , like a park on a sunny day, or somewhere indoors with a view on a stormy rainy day, or Coburg square when its humming with activity, or anywhere with jessie sleeping up against my body.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

-isms and -centrisms

I've been thinking about how there's no word for "disablism" comparable to sexism, racism and homophobia. But, there is a concept-word ableism (comparable to androcentrism, ethnocentrism/Eurocentrism/Anglocentrism, and heterocentrism). And yet, the texts that I have been collecting for my thesis that theoretically challenge "disablism" don't challenge ablism, in fact they tend to reproduce it. I think that's likely to be one of the observations that I explore - the fact that challenging the "-ism" often takes the form of reinforcing the "-centrism".
So, for example, there's this poster I've been analysing (you might have seen it around, especially at train stations, it's pretty common). It has two men-of-colour standing next to each other in a train, with their faces visible, and two separate white women sitting with their faces turned away or heavily cropped. The text says "We're working for our future. Just like you." I'm arguing that this text creates an (objectified) "us," who is coloured, and a (subjectified) "you" (the viewer) who is white; the poster tries to combat racism - stigmatisation of coloured people - by saying they are the same as white people. This reinforces the centrality and even the "normality" of whiteness. It also serves to erase any distinctiveness of people of colour (as either a group, or as many different groups. In fact, I'd argue that the grouping of the two men together (with quite visible "racial" differences) contrasts with the separateness of the two white women - suggesting a sense of "them" (coloured people) being a homogenous group, while white people are allowed to be individuals). The text reinforces Anglo-centrism, while trying to challenge racism.

Another poster (it's less common and it took me ages to find one I could photograph) has the icon for a disabled person, but holding a tennis racquet. The main text says "See the person, not the disability" while much smaller text says "Disability means possibility" Again, while this text is obviously trying to combat "disablism" - stigmatisation of disabled people - it does so by reproducing ableism. It does this in several ways. It objectifies disabled people (who are the person seen, not the person seeing), while subjectifying non-disabled people (because those with disabilities don't just see disability, they experience/live it!). It also tells the viewer to ignore any distinctiveness associated with disability, erasing disability culture(s), disabled experiences and disabled perspectives on the world. And, the word "possibility" to me is like Yooralla's "People helping people achieve" - what is "possible" seems to be things commonly associated with ability - like playing tennis. It reminds me of something I read that suggested the internet was created by people on the aspergers-autism spectrum, to meet their needs (intellectual and communicative). What this idea opened up for me was the idea that people with disabilities aren't just impaired able-bodies, who are able to do things that able-bodied people do, but not so well (unless they are super-crips, as Eli Clare calls them) - disability is a mode of inhabiting the world that has various limitations and various possibilities - possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to people whose main experience of disability is ableism. I believe that the experiences of disabled people are a necessary part of an elaborated understanding what disability can mean.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

epistemic privilege

I'm interested in the concept of "epistemic privilege" - the idea that those who are marginalised occupy a position of privilege in terms of understanding "how the world works".

I'm not sure who first used this particular expression, but it probably originated in Marx's claim that the ruling ideas of any historical period are those of the ruling class. This starting point has been elaborated into "standpoint theory" (e.g. by Nancy Hartstock, Sandra Harding), which focuses beyond class to looking at marginalised people and their (our) exclusion from the construction of knowledge. Harding argues that marginalised people are in a privileged position to access "objective truth" (she writes about science), because marginalized groups learn the dominant viewpoint while experiencing its limitations, and hence are in the best position to see its limitations. This certainly resonates with my experience, especially in the context of mental health diagnosis.

Of course, this idea must be elaborated to explore complexities, e.g. (i) how far does epistemic privilege extend? e.g. do marginalised people have a privileged understanding of phenomena beyond the specificities of their marginalisation (e.g. of "science" as Harding claims)? (ii) surely men can come to understand relations of sexism, or does their position of privilege intrinsically preclude their understanding? (iii) how do multiple axes of marginalisation intersect? (iv) is it intrinsic to the positioning, or does one have to have "class consciousness" to have access to epistemic privilege? - I know Marx has ideas on this, but I haven't read any Marx.

While this idea could be problematic if it essentialises or reifies the centre/margin distinction, there's definitely something to it. Like all operations of privilege, it has to encompass plurality and diversity (without losing sight of hierarchical relations within diversity).

Also, to finish off, here's a passage from Said's work (the guy who wrote Orientalism and inspired postcolonialism as an intellectual enterprise). I think this captures the relationship between personal experience and political ideas:
"There is therefore this quite complicated mix between the private and public worlds, my own history, values, writing and positions as they derive from my experiences, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice." (Representations of the Intellectual, 1994:9)

Saturday, September 8, 2007

maxim of relevance?

I've been thinking about a particular element of thesis lately - the idea that when you state something, you invoke its opposite. So, for example, when you say something like "Disability no barrier to artistic ability" (as one of my texts does), this invokes the suggestion that "disability is a barrier to artistic ability" or perhaps something like "some people think that disability is a barrier to artistic ability". I just realised that one way of explaining this is with recourse to Grice's maxim of relevance.

OK, quick crash course in pragmatics. A guy called Paul Grice suggested (in 1975) that people basically tend the follow these rules in normal conversations:
(i) Maxim of Quality: do not say what you believe to be false or what you lack evidence for;
(ii) Maxim of Quantity: be as informative as required (but neither more or less so);
(iii) Maxim of Relevance: be relevant
(iv) Maxim of Manner: avoid obscurity, ambiguity, prolixity, etc. be orderly.
He argued that people don't always follow these maxims, but when they do, they can be understood as "violating" one (or more). So, for example, if you do say something that is apparently irrelevant, the hearer assumes that there is some reason for this - eg. that the statement is actually relevant (somehow), or that the speaker is intending something else to be understood.

Anyway, I've been thinking that the statement "Disability no barrier to artistic ability" is interpretable as consistent with the maxim or relevance only in a context where there is a prior assumption that "some people think that disablity is a barrier" ...

anyway, Jan's pestering me (in a lovely way) to walk Jessie with her, so I'll leave it there ...

Thursday, September 6, 2007

apocalypto

do you ever have a sudden realisation that futuristic apocalyptic visions in movies are unnecessary - we're already living in a synthetic concrete grimy life-destroying world? this morning, i was walking up sydney rd (not the most lushly vegetated street in melbourne), going to get money out of the atm. the sky above me was grey and there was a low-flying aeroplane that was suddenly seemed a terrifying, mechanical bird. all around me were rows of concrete boxes ("shops"), asphalt underfoot where there should have been dirt and things growing, everything was covered with a layer of of toxic filth, scraps of synthetic trash floated along various surfaces, and then there were the cars ... do cars ever suddenly appear to you (like they probably do all the time to non-civilised animals) as terrifying, sliding smoothly but so quickly in their mechanical linear motion? in my hand was a piece of plastic, plastic that i needed so i could get food, by sticking it in a big metal machine that gave me bits of plastic that i could exchange for plastic food (coffee and croissants).

lately, i've been reading R.D. Laing (anti-psychiatrist, "The politics of experience"). he argues that being "normal" in this world means assimilating into a crazy world. the radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen argues similarly, that we must all be mad to keep on pretending that the levels of environmental and other abuse that we depend on to maintain our way of life is somehow "normal". ... maybe this was an experiential expression of
these intellectual engagements, but i suspect it was the animal me, barely awake from sleep and not yet fully in "civilised human" mode.

i really need to move to the country some time ...

Monday, August 27, 2007

eugnics and emancipation

I've been reading SO many of those "Introducing ..." books in the past month or so. I'm just finishing postmodernism today. Well "finishing postmodernism" is perhaps a slightly misleading phrasing - after all, I'm actually just finishing a picture book with few words that briefly presents basic ideas in postmodernist writings. Anyway, I'm really inspired by bits of postmodernist theory, mainly the scepticism towards metanarratives - in some ways, its similar to what I called "political agnosticism" in my previous post. I like to remain open to new ways of understanding the world (some of you may remember that was part of the thinking behind "Grey").

I'm also realising that my thesis is basically arguing that eugenicist and emancipatory ideologies have more in common than they would like to admit. It's a bit Hage-esque - Hage argues that tolerant cosmopolitans and intolerant racists are united in their sense of (Foucaultian) governmentality - or entitlement to control. This is despite the fact that tolerant cosmopolitans like to understand themselves as fundamentally opposed to intolerant racists (in fact, arguably their identity is constructed oppositionally to "racists"). I'm arguing that both eugenicist and emancipatory (or progressive) ideologies are predicated on similar beliefs:
(i) the ontological existence of categories of people,
(ii) extant hierarchies between them, (although, of course they are opposed in their ethical appraisal of these hierarchies);
(iii) that they have a governmental right to control this hierarchy (Hage's central idea);
(iv) and a fundamental sense of identity related to engaging in this control.

I'm not arguing a moral or ethical equivalence (or course), for one is horrific, the other is tolerable. But I disagree with premise (iii), and in fact, I think that those who engage in "defending the Other" are often profounding misguided and destructive. It's especially problematic when many of the arguments used by progressives to respond to existing hierarchies [ie. (ii) in my list above] arguments like "queers aren't really any different to straights", or "disabled people need pity and help from non-disabled people" silence the Other and serve more to construct the identity of the progressive as Good than to do anything "for" the Other.

Of course, this is all complicated by the discourses produced by the Other themselves, which often parallel those that I am critiquing. See, on the one hand, I valorise "self-definition", but on the other I privilege my own definitions!

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

political agnosticism

i've been thinking lately about political identities. in lots of ways, i'm a lefty. but i resist being a lefty in the sense that it is an inherenly oppositional identity, one that makes sense only in opposition to conservatives/right-wingers.

Barack Obama said something that really struck a chord with me:
"I'm considered a progressive Democrat. But if a Republican or conservative or libertarian or free-marketeer has a better idea, I am happy to steal ideas from anybody - and in that sense I'm agnostic."

Certainly, inasmuch as political identity is ascribed, I'm a lefty. Inasmuch as political identity is tribal, I'm a lefty with some hesitations ... I really like Obama's idea of agnosticism.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

nerd pride

i've been tossing ideas in my head for the past few days for new t-shirt ideas. i've just gotten into making my own t-shirts. the first one says "curls just wanna have fun" and has a gorgeous image of curls.

anyway, so this one is going to say "NERD PRIDE", and will be made from material sewn on to a t-shirt. the thinking behind it all is that i've identified as a nerd for a really long time - first in high school when i gave up being a rebel in year 8. i discovered this bunch of people who had fun without graffi-ing, smoking and who actually did their homework. apparently i delightedly identified us all as nerds, although noone else delighted in the label (thanks allie for bringing that repressed memory back up!).

then for several years i lapsed, or rather was a nerd but without self-identifying as such. but now that i'm doing my thesis, i'm reclaiming the label. i had forgotten about my earlier identification with it, but now that the connection has been made, it's feeling like a reclamation of my own past.

but there's an added layer of amusement for me. one of the central parts of my thesis is the idea that declaring something positive about a group in fact simultaneously declares its negation. so, when one says "nerd pride", this intrinsically suggests that nerds are not something to be proud of. in my data for my thesis, there's a line from a disability charity poster that says "because this is our community." the very act of declaring this evokes the idea that this might not be "their" community. typically, these posters assume a pre-existing rejection and are sincerely trying to oppose that rejection. but, i'm arguing, it's not that simple. anyway, before i go too far into my thesis in this post, i am amused that this t-shirt references my thesis and in so doing proves my nerd pride :>

old friends

i'd been having a rough week
but last night i hung out with old friends.

i'm talking high school friends (which for me was 10 years ago now), friends i used to see daily but now see every six months or less. sare's in a band and it was her birthday.

i don't know the contours of these women's lives- in fact when i knew them they were barely women at all - and yet i feel at ease around them, unquestionably welcome.

sare had a boy draped on her arm often enough that i'm figuring he's a significant other in her life, but we've never spoken of it. i vaguely remember seeing him before. a friend of sare's remembered my name from last time we met, i didn't even remember her face. kat had a new boy, although, again, i don't know any of the contours. sara just got back from dubai. i vaguely remember her mentioning it being a pipe-dream but i didn't know she'd actually gone. these are not the people i am close to these days, i'm sure they know just as little of the shape of my life.

all our lives keep moving, the details all changing, the details that give our lives meaning. in some ways it makes no sense to say we know each other at all - i've changed so much since high school, haven't I? - our lives have taken such different directions. and yet there's an underlying continuity that's profoundly both comforting and discomforting.

these women can poke some old memory, summoning another time. my high school years were filled with frustration, deep disappointment and pent-up fury, constantly simmering not far below the surface, overlaid most times with a smile. their anecdotes could sound cruel, brutally honest, coming from anyone else. but the distance between then and now, and the intimacy between us back then, affords a chance for laughter rather than judgement.

it's cosy, comforting, like an old stuffed toy that plays a negligible role in adult life, and yet is kept. sare offered to read chapters of my thesis when i write them. and she was genuine. she always was so generous ...

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Derrida and undecidability (or the stranger)

OK, so i've been foraying into Derrida's ideas. At the moment, I'm getting my head around the idea of the "undecidables", those elements that disrupt binary categories (e.g. trans/intersex/androgynes "between" the categories of male and female), and how these undecidables undermine conceptual stability. Well, in the case of trans and intersex experiences, there's often an effort to assign categorical membership to resolve the "undecidability", so that a person is assigned (or actively participates in the assignment of) a sex/gender.

Anyway, a line that intrigued me was "between friends and enemies, the stranger".

I am interested in this idea of the "stranger" - one who is irreconcilably different to oneself, but with no sense of hostility. The reason for my interest is that I think this is a useful way of approaching socio-cultural diversity - how does one coexist with strangers? I think that often those who are different to the hegemonic norm (e.g. queers, people of color, disabled people) are often either framed as enemies or friends (or perhaps not in the case of disabled people who are infantilised and perhaps beyond this binary?). I mean specifically the rhetoric of well-meaning progressives who frame those who are different as friends, in the sense that they are "like us". This negates "their" differences from "us" as essentially meaningless. I am interested in how one can ethically recognise that another is (potentially) a stranger and coexist. I say potentially a stranger because some people do seek to assimilate into the hegemonic norms, and don't identify themselves as existing beyond those norms. I think radical queers often take pleasure in declaring their "enemy" status to the hegemonic norms, partly just for the pleasure of the act of rebellion, partly in order to carve a space for themselves that works for their desires, and partly challenging the power of the norms. I get it, and live my life partly as a radical queer, and I also live my life partly as an assimilationist, eager to carve a space that is not founded on perpetual struggle; but I strive to understand how to welcome the grey, how to relate to others without reducing their differences (from me) and assuming they are "just like me" and without hostility. How to be with the stranger.

vulnerability

just read an email that describes children in public hospitals as "the most vulnerable in our society". There's a link between (perceptions of) vulnerability and paternalism - the word clearly comes from the idea of "fathering", today has elements of treating someone as if they need protection. i was thinking about the links between "Muslim women" and "Aboriginal women and children" and "disabled people" and "children dying of AIDS in Africa" in the progressive imagination. I think they are united in vulnerability, and a sense that "we" can "help" "them", even that "they" "need" "our" "help". Of course, it isn't just progressives who frame these Others in this way, it's fairly common for the enlightened privileged, but I want to problematise how we (privileged progressives) do this framing, because I think we don't get that we are colonising and degrading.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

ungrounded

last week i met up with an academic (sara wills, australia centre) whose academic approach was so similar to mine (or perhaps overlapping) that she invited me to a reading group she is in. i was so terribly chuffed at the time, and today i just got an email with suggestions for readings the group might like to undertake.

WOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!!

oh my goddess this is like the most exciting thing for a nerd like me. so, anyway, yes, 10 minutes ago i was feeling all grounded and stuff, but this is like totally exciting!

i think i might work on my "nerd" t-shirt idea tonight as a celebration. :>

grounded

i just went for a walk along the merri with jessie. i've been ungrounded all day, but the creek and surrounding parklands never fails to ground me. the sun and movement of the wind on my skin reconnected me to my body, and the willowing of the winter sun and its dazzling reflection off the water reminded me of simple joy.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

I books for beginners

i've been reading a few of those books "Introducing ..." and "(so-and-so) for beginners" lately.

even though i've basically done 2 arts degrees (and half a law degree), there are enormous gaps in my understanding of what i would consider "fundamentals." i've been filling in (the enormous) gaps in my understanding of Foucault, Butler, Derrida, concepts like "the gaze", postcolonial theory, critical race studies, ... there are a lot of things I've done some reading in, but not enough to say i know even basics of the area.

as an aside, it's funny that i even structure the world like this - into "fundamentals" and other stuff. in many ways it's so elitist and hierarchical and often putting dead white men (or someone similar) up on pedastools, as if their thoughts are more valuable ... and yet all of those i am devouring at the moment are radically anti-establishment; in some ways they are the establishment of the "counter establishment." i think it's deeply ironic and anti-democratic, but yet i am nourishing my intellectual appetite.

the personal irony for me here is that when i first enrolled in uni, i wanted to study "the fundamentals" but i was very oriented towards the establishment's values - i studied Classics (Latin), Pure Mathematics, Philosophy, English literature (Shakespeare, of course, with some Modern classics too), and chemistry (it's not Physics, but it was what i excelled at). Pretty quickly, my foundations were shaken and I realised that English lit was full of postmodernism (which I couldn't get my head around until several years later), I took a linguistics course (in order to learn better grammar so I could understand Latin - and by second year I had added Ancient Greek and Old English to my repertoire), but instead of being told what's right and wrong, linguistics opened up a whole new, critical, world. then I got beaten up by cops at a protest, fell in lust with chicks and gradually realised that the establishment is boring, got involved in activism, later got burnt by activism, ...

anyway, here i am returning to my roots in some ways. because i do thrive on rigorous intellectual engagement. in some ways i miss maths and chem, the part of me that delights in brilliance, whether i myself am involved, or whether it's vicarious (like reading other people's brilliant ideas). but today my intellectual engagement is intrinsically coupled with an ethical awareness and commitment. At the heart of my ethical values is diversity, and here's where I am challenged - for many of the ideas that i am enthralled by are elitist ... my flash of inspiration in this thought has just fled me and i am left groping for coherence ... i think this all has something to do with class, which i confess i don't have much insight into. i am profoundly middle class in my orientation, passions (classical music anyone?), aesthetics, ambitions, ...

anyway, i have (physical) pain that i need to go deal with now. thanks for reading :>

amy

today is the anniversary of the death of my lover, amy, in a car accident. 6 years now.

grief is not linear and it is unaware of how the rest of the world measures time. but this date is always a time for reflection. more than anything, a time to wallow in memories and appreciate her life.

last night i had an extended conversation with a friend who had also lost a lover in a car accident, the year before. our situations were so similar that there was profound recognition as we shared our histories. ... first lesbian love, the awakening into a new way of being, the intensity, the discoveries of unimaginable joys and delights ... and yet the complexity, the "should we really be doing this", the secrecy, the pleasures layered with doubt and shame ... and the brevity. then the shock, the horror, the disbelief, but then almost instantly, overlaid, instinctive, mandated silence, sealed with shame, repression of all feeling, energy spent comforting others instead of grieving ... the evasions, multiple and ever multiplying, "my friend", the uncertainty of what details could be shared, what lies needed to be perpetuated, who knew what truths, or what subtle shades of truth. and then slowly, grief surfacing at unexpected moments, as a car like hers passs by, or someone walks her walk, or has green socks, or shares some trivial detail with her, or something happens and i want her to know.

even now, i am unsure of who to share this whole part of my life with. because our story is hers too and she's not alive to tell me her thoughts.

happily, over time, the emotional landscape becomes less harsh, the complexities and doubts become washed over with a clarity of focus: the fact of love. love happens and it's magic. so today i am giving up feeling any more residual guilt, shame or doubt about what Amy and i shared. I loved her, and I know she loved me. That was beautiful, while it lasted, it was what life is about.

Monday, July 30, 2007

a long absence

dear blog follower(s)

it's been a while. over a month. in breaking news, i just did a night of facebooking (mainly stalking exes, I confess). I managed to get my own birthday wrong (well facebook did that) ... it was fun though, i recommend it.

in other news, today i began reading derrida. i think i was expecting it to be dense and difficult and somehow a "ta da!" moment. but it wasn't. it was good - an essay that i already knew was going to be relevant to my work. he was talking about hospitality and forgiveness (separately); basically arguing that they depend on a paradox, that forgiveness is really only forgiveness when it is unconditional, forgiving what is really "unforgivable". in terms of my study, it's relevant cos i'm challenging the "tolerance" of liberals, who so often argue for tolerance on the basis that particular groups really "aren't different", when for me the challenge is to work out how to respond ethically to difference without erasing it, exotising it, or whatever else so often happens. Hmmm i suspect this is rambling late at night. what i meant to say was that i read butler, foucault and derrida all in the same day. it made me laugh, cos it all feels so performative, this whole "being a student" thing. i mean, i really am doing it.

anyway, this is really just a place-filler. i will get back to writing again :>

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

creativity vs politics

while a somewhat simplistic dichotomy, i want to explore the binary of creativity vs politics

specifically, i'm thinking about the difference between a poster that argues (politically) for the "inclusion" of disabled people. or something similar; and the creative agency of disabled people. [something to do with representation?] I was thinking how much more I'd like to see billboards with poems by disabled people, like the many spoken word pieces i've read/viewed.

the political slogans that are typically on billboards are reductionistic, didactic and essentialising. poetry, by contrast, is exploratory, subtle, open. importantly, poetry is an expression of agency, whereas political slogans in many ways replace agency with representation (Marx's famous "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented", the quote with which Said opens Orientalism).

One of the wonderful crip texts i'm reading at the moment explores some "alternative" narratives of disability, focusing on sexuality and community. Arguably, these too are about creativity, agency, desire. I think there's something critical here - politics is too often the opposite of creativity. I don't mean all politics, for the most engaging politics, in my experience, is driven by love, rage, engagement, community and creativity. but, there is something about organised politics that erases the immediacy of human subjectivity. hmmm.

ok, so i'm holding back something critical to understanding all this. my own experience is that i was involved in student politics for a few years, and in hindsight, i think it was strangling my own creativity. i think i systematically internally erased my own individual desires and ideas for some imagined consensus-derived idea of what should be. this is really hard to ariculate, and even now i am sensing an opposition to this idea from the imagined "others in the group" - which is *exactly* my point. politics in some ways is about pinning down what "should be" and i think i have spent many many years trying to discipline myself into being what i should be. i think in many ways i internalised this way more than many people involved in student politics, and i'm not arguing that this is the fault of student politics, rather, it's also to do with my own personality, a form of profound perfectionism.

anyway, i want to keep exploring this idea, because there's something here that is ringing bells inside my body, startlingly beautiful bells, resonating loudly.

my experience of political engagment has been a fusion, or perhaps a borderline, between "radical" and "down-to-earth." i mean radical in the sense of pushing deeper towards the roots of an issue, and down-to-earth, in the sense of rejecting an exclusively "radicool" agenda that is scornful of the people in my life who don't live their lives according to the radicool agenda. some would call this latter part "moderate", and certainly, the people i worked with politically were considered between the ALP and the more "radical" elements like socialists or radical queers.

student politics caused me enormous heart-ache. i wasn't able to exist in a world where everything mattered to me, but wasn't done in ways that accorded with my political visions. working with people from various political stripes, constantly having to argue my politics, endeavouring, usually unsuccessfully to persuade people of my conclusions, based on political reasoning, killed my spirit. yes, it was in a huge part my personality, a huge idealist, stubborn, opinionated, bright, defensive, argumentative, etc. but i think there's something in the nature of political organisations that kills creativity.

i burnt out. i fled to my garden and chickens and sewing and partner and local park and circus and home-cooking and home-making and general anti-socialness. i have no doubt that the massive outpouring of creativity that i am undergoing is a response to a feeling of repressed creativity during my student politics days. it's as if my creativity is never wrong, is never open to suggestion or improvement or compromise or watering down. it can be as outrageous, or beautiful, or whimsical, and HONEST as i feel like being.

anyway, returning to the idea of billboards with poems on them. the more i read about "diversity" and "stigma management" and "marginalisation", the more i am inspired by the personal acts of creation, of resistance, or self-definition as THE ANSWER to stigma and marginalisation. there's a line from a danica lani song that comes to mind here "who gives a fuck about objectivity, i want to hear your truth, sista" anything else is reductionistic.

but i'm not arguing for individualism per se. what i find really powerful is when you get a bunch of people in a room together, all putting forward their own stories and feeling the commonality. yeah, feminism consciousness raising groups, or a dyke spoken word night, or the multicultural queer conference. speaking from the personal grounds the political.

i don't really know what happens next though. i know that feminism went through a phase of consciousness raising, and then kinda moved on, formulating platitudes based on CR insights. but then they kinda froze. it's like PC stuff. political correctness is often originally grounded in personal experience, but then it ossifies.

anyway, i'll end there.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

displaying diversity

so, here's a chapter.

comparing the poster children/disability charities
with
multicultural celebrations
with
Midsumma/Mardi Gras

arguably, these are the dominant ways in which each of these forms of diversity is "displayed" for public consumption.

um, does anyone else get the feeling that this is actually not "a chapter" but "a thesis"? (funny question, i know, becuase it is predicated on the assumption that anyone else is even reading this :>)

Friday, June 15, 2007

eggs again!

two of the chookens are laying eggs. one of them is laying the the laying box - where i put two fake eggs (thanks mum, again!) - i assume this is alice, cos that's where she used to lay. but one of them has been laying from her perch - i assume it's pearl cos her comb is much bigger than molly cocoa's, which means she's probably older. Anyway, these eggs smash into their droppings box. it's totally feral. am thinking that maybe i should remove their perches for a few days until they lay in the laying box. they can all sleep in the laying box (alice, betty and emma used to sleep there).

by the say, i can't believe i haven't called a chicken "daisy" yet. the next ones will be called "daisy" and "claire" - i prefer clara, but jan and i say it very differently - she says "claire-a" and i say "clar-a", so we agreed the chicken would get confused if we called her different names.

whose community?

Yooralla ad claims on behalf of disabled people "this is our community" - is an example of mainstreaming and a denial of disability community/culture!

c.f. Cheryl Marie Wade, an awesome performance artist, whose work is represented in Vital Signs: Crip culture talks back (so the name alone tells you that a crip culture is being asserted):
"My primary audience is always my community and I hope always to do work where my community can go "yeah!" But I want it to be such good work that I get places where they normally wouldn't let a gimp in. You know what I'm saying here?"

I think the erasure of disability community/culture is also an erasure of the support that disabled people give each other.

Earlier in the video, Carol Gill argues:
"I believe very firmly in disability culture and if we didn't have it, we should, because, I think, ... as a psychologist, I've looked at members of minority groups, I've worked with members of minority groups who are dealing with oppression on a daily basis who need to survive it, both physically and emotionally. And I see that what works for other minority groups is to have a recognized body of values, of symbols, including language, of rituals that bring people together."

There is a blurring of "community" and "culture".

Elsewhere in the video, Harlan Hahn argues for the existence of "disability culture" by arguing that disabled people have a food, fast-food. His evidence is his own vox pop at a conference, where everyone in the room said they go to drive-thrus because impaired mobility makes this easier than going inside a restaurant. This is, at best, tenuous, and at worst, ridiculous, patently untrue, and exclusive. I think that it does point to a commonality of experience, but I know a lot of disabled people who either (a) can't afford to eat out (the disability pension is often stretched just to cover basic life stuff, especially for those I know who have large medical/adaptive expenses) or (b) hate fast food for ethical reasons.

Gill's call for symbols and rituals bothers me, because it brings back memories for me of Lesfest (a lesbian, trans-exclusive gathering), which I attended a few years back. Lesfest had been cancelled because it had sought and been denied an exemption from equal opportunity legislation (they wanted to be allowed to exclude trans women). The gathering was held anyway, but was by-invitation-only, and secretive. I remember that on the first day, we all sat in a circle, each in turn offering symbols of our community, in an effort to prove to ourselves that we did indeed have a community. We didn't just argue a common political commitment - to an understanding of our common lesbian experience as being predicated on an experience of growing up gendered female (a reasonable basis, I think for the community's cohesion). Instead, symbols wer invoked that included hair style, colours, ways of dressing, music, etc. I remember feeling alienated at the time - I was one of only a handfull of young women there, and I had long hair, in dread-locks, with pretty colours woven through - I felt "unacceptably" feminine. In so many ways, I conform to the lesbian feminist stereotype, but yet I felt somehow unwelcome. It didn't help that I had already been policed/verbally abused for allegedly inviting a bisexual to the lesbian-only gathering. The allegation was unfounded (it was based on a misunderstanding) but did inform my whole experience of the gathering. It was interesting, because I actually respected the community's boundaries at that point in time, but because I wasn't yet a "trusted part of the community", I was suspected of disloyalty. At the time, I wrote a letter to Lesbian Network (the community's magazine, which I helped edit for a while), arguing that while I agreed with any community's right to self-define, I opposed the suspicious internal policing that inevitably arises when you police the borders (I think I drew on Hage's writings!)

In hindsight, I think I was somewhat naive - now I would argue that policing the borders is indefensible. I wish the Lesfest community had simply been clear about what we want and are interested in (e.g. lesbian feminist politics), and allowed people to self-select their involvement. My experience of transfolk is that there may have been trans people attending, in an effort to affirm their lesbian-female identity, there may not. But declare war on trans-identity and transfolk will come out in force. Trans-identity is currently incredibly defensive, which is understandable, since many trans people have to fight every day of their lives to affirm their identity.

Anyway, the lesbian community is still reeling from the "sex wars" of the 1980s, that this is all just the latest chapter in a long war. It's a war that scares me cos I am on both sides and neither. I'm scared because I can see battle lines drawn right down my own body, my own history, dividing one lover from another, one joy from another. I want no part in a defensively defined community.

On a completely different note, here's a very recent and remarkably stereotypical response from a gay man involved in Equal Love (to get same-sex relationship recognition):

"We see that the first priority is swaying the general population toward the idea of same-sex marriage by countering the arguments against, talking to community groups about the injustice and generally getting the message across that we too are "normal" tax paying citizens that don't have 2 heads and deserve consideration as well."

Wow! Um, what about those of us who are not "normal", who avoid paying taxes wherever possible or who live below the poverty line and so don't pay taxes, or whose bodies do not conform to the invoked normality (maybe not 2 heads, but how about no arms, like Mary Duffy in Vital Signs?) ... do we deserve "consideration" as well?

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Tragic conference experience

i am presenting at a conference tomorrow and i just read jan my prepared talk. alas, half-way through it was blatantly obvious that my 20 minute talk was going to take at least 45 minutes. so i cut it, well we cut it together. it was tragic, difficult and kinda easy too. we started at midnight (my deadline for finishing) and cut for 12 minutes. i think cos it was the middle of the night, it was easier to be brutal (i have sleep as a reward).

it's brilliant though. i'm so proud of it.

if i hadn't read it to jan, i'm not sure how i would have coped tomorrow.

anyway, bed now. just thought i didn't want to let this pass without a blog entry!

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

different types of stigma

today i started re-reading Goffman's absolute classic text "Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity". It's one of those books that is simultaneoulsy hopelessly outdated and incredibly relevant.

OK, so the bit I wanted to share is where he outlines what he sees as the 3 different bases for an individual being stigmatized (Goffman, by the way, focusses exclusively, and problematically, on stigma as an individual phenomenon, rather than involving groups, but let's ignore that for the time being).

Goffman's 3 types of stigma:
(i) "abominations of the body": various physical deformities.
(ii) "blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering of unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour."
(iii) tribal stigma of race, nation and religion; that "equally contaminate all members of a family"

OK, so Goffman was writing in 1963, but I think that these days only some types of prejudice are socially acceptable, while others are taboo. I think that "abominations of the body" (i) and "tribal stigmas" (iii) are unacceptable bases for prejudice, but "blemishes of individual character" (ii) are an entirely acceptable basis.

So, often people try to argue that a particular stigmatised feature is of type (ii) if they wish to vilify the individual/group and conversely that the feature is actually not of type (ii) if they wish to defend the individual/group. For example, people who wish to vilify Islam frame it as "radical political behaviour", or use the blurry term "culture". Those who wish to defend it frame it as merely a religion. Similarly, some who wish to defend homos argue that it is biologically based, while some who wish to vilify us frame it in terms of the "gay lifestyle." Mental health stuff is similar, in that we are portrayed as having agency over our stigmatised behaviours by those who want to vilify us, but we are presented as having an "illness" comparable to a bodily "disorder" by those who wish to defend us.

Then, we come to those who valorise the middle category - largely queers but also gimps, crips and mad folk. For example, the self-identified "sex radicals" who are organising "Camp Betty" (a sex-radical gathering) write stuff like:
"Let's show her [Betty, aka the Queen] what this great nation was built on - criminals, perverts and stolen land. So poofters, sheilas, reffos, squatters, deviants and outsiders - your time is now."

Interesting stuff. I'm pretty excited. Thanks Erving Goff-man!

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Perlocution revisited

Remember I wrote a few weeks ago about my readings on perlocution (Austin, Searle, etc)? Well, I was suggesting that maybe one function of discourse is to anounce the subject position of the author, to show that they are a good liberal or nice to disabled people, or whatever. Anyway, so today I discovered that Foucault already writes about what I was trying to articulate - in the idea of "enunciative modalities" that he explored in The Archaelogy of Knowledge. I must confess it was SO exciting to read that Foucault had expressed exactly the idea that i was toying with. anyway, Fairclough also writes about it, so I guess Fairclough might just end up being more useful than i had felt.

learning skills unit visit

so, i went to the learning skills unit yesterday cos i decided it was time to review how I do things. in some ways the visit was completely useless, cos it really didn't sort out the problems i've been having, but i think actually it was good, cos i already know what my problems are, and the advisor really told me what i already knew.

basically my problems are this:
(1) i don't spend enough time each day on my thesis. i work in spurts and some days i'll be really productive and get heaps done in terms of reading, processing and writing up, but other days i spend a LOT more time in the garden and doing stuff around the house than i spend studying. basically, i know the solution. (i) be self-disciplined, be that by timetabling my time at home, or any other way to make myself sit at my desk and get through the work. OR (ii) decide that working at home isn't working and study somewhere else. So, i've decided, i'm on probation. i either have to convince myself that studying at home is possible or i'm not allowed to do it any more.
(2) i have heaps of books on my shelves and the pile seems to grow bigger, and i feel overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. i have a mental list also of all these books i want to read, and i find that stressful, knowing that i'm not finding the time to keep up with what i want to be reading. solution? ironically, it's not to read more, but to write more. she reckons that i need to start writing more, so that my reading needs will become clearer. the other thing she suggested was that i should put my photocopied articles into piles, according to how central they are to my research. one pile (the biggest) is "I need to know about these articles"; the next (middle sized) is "i need to understand these articles" and the other (smallest) is "I need to know these articles inside and out." I think i've been mentally putting everything into the last pile, when most of them in truth could sit in the first or second pile.

oh and in terms of writing, she suggested i take blog entries and expand them - i thought that was a good way to get something on the page. i mean, i've tried to write a few times - i open a microsoft word document and look at the blank page and my mind suddenly mirrors its blankness.

ps i haven't written much for a while cos i've had stomach troubles. it's been kinda painful. the pain killers i got the other day are marvellous though. marvellous.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

who gets to make pronouncements

been thinking a bit about the paradoxical nature of good intentioned statements. Making the statement, paradoxically, casts doubt on the proposition (if it wasn't there already).

What??

Ok, some examples, Yooralla's "This is our community", said about disabled people, only really makes sense if there was doubt. I believe that it conjures up its negation (this train of thought is pretty new and fragile, so be kind).

How about some more examples? My circus trainer last year, Francesca, said something that irked me but at the time I couldn't express why. She was promoting a performance by some young people she was working with who were insitutionalised for mental health reasons. She said "They're really lovely" in a way that seemed to me that it implied a preface like "You wouldn't really think it, but ..." In some ways statements like these imply even more, something like "I know that people like you and I don't usually have much experience with these people, and that we tend to think that they are not lovely, but I am a good person who does good things for these poor people and I can authoritatively tell you that people like you and I should think that they are lovely."

Similarly, I recently read Jonathon Welch's comments on members of the Choir of Hard Knocks (which he conducts): "If I had a higher purpose for this [the Choir of Hard Knocks] it would be to change government policy for funding for all these sorts of projects. I hope people will see that these people are not just homeless, they are human beings, and they have value and worth and they have the right to dignity and self respect just like any other human being does." Really? Wow. They are human? You know, I always wondered if they were just really big rats. ... In this example, I just love the juxtaposition between the first people (who are the subject of "will see") and the second people (specifically, these people, the object that is seen) - the first seems to exclude the homeless people, who probably don't actually doubt the fact that they are human. It's like Jonathon is simultaneously (overtly) acknowledging their humanity, while (covertly) denying them inclusion in the category of "people."

This is one of the central patterns I want to explore in my thesis.

I'm wondering at this point if these observations are me bringing extra-linguistic (real-world) knowledge into my interpretation, or if this is inherent in the linguistic encoding. Michael Power, a friend of mine, suggested the latter to me several months ago (before I started my thesis), and recommended I read Searle's Expression and Meaning. I'll get back to you if I become any wiser on this matter.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

political correctness

i've been reading a bit today about political correctness. it's an interesting expression, because in my understanding it is predominantly used to silence those who feel that it's not OK to be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc, and who are sensitive to more subtle forms of unintended prejudice. Something like that.

Jan said something interesting a few weeks ago, though. She said "political correctness is all about what language white people can use, e.g. multiculturalism". I realised that it is about creating a comfortable language, rather than facing discomfort. jan uses "women of colour" partly because of the discomfort it induces in white women - we are forced to confront privilege, and we are excluded.

quite a bit of what i read is written by people who think that political correctness equals the right language. i get so pissed with "right on" language. what interests me so much more with language is its use, its fluidity, its context-based meaning. that is, people use language to communicate, and we communicate a lot more than what a dictionary can possible capture.

when jan calls herself a woman of colour, she's not just describing her gender and skin colour, or her ethnic background, (in what I understand) she's claiming solidarity with other women of colour, naming "colouredness" as a grounds for shared experience, in contrast with women who are white, as well as naming woman-of-colour-edness as a grounds for shared experience. she's rejecting the framing of her identity within categories that are constructed in ways that fail to capture her experience of the world. she is choosing her own frame, one that is not controlled by the white patriarchy, or white feminists, or any status-quo lovers; one that does not carry a normalising burden, or a set of images; one that she brings from her American upbringing, into a new context, offering it, but not imposing it (partly through an inability to impose her definitions on anyone, but primarily through no desire to define anyone else). woman of colour seems to be working for jan in creating some community to inhabit where her gendered and racialised experiences of the world are validated, discussed, shared, contrasted, made meaning of.

the other day, another of the trainees at WIRE argued with Jan that she doesn't see Jan as coloured, that she sees Jan as white like her. this is exactly the sort of experience where calling herself a "woman of colour" is useful. it's a conscious, self-loving, self-defining label.

she retains control of the label, well, actually she shares it with other self-identifying women of colour.

hey jan. tell me if i'm missing something, or if i am understanding you properly. xx

and another section heading

ooow ooow ooow

oh and another idea for a section:
privilege
It would be so worthwhile to discuss privilege in a section
*Hage's discussion in White Nation about parallels between cosmo-multiculturalists and exclusionary nationalists
*Clare and Elliott's wonderful discussion of "rednecks" - the displacement of prejudice onto rural, working class people
*discussion of Whiteness, white theory
*privilege vs centricity (e.g. heterocentricity, ablism)
*my experience of discussing whether multiculturalism is a useful term or not, where Millsom said she thinks it's redeemable, c.f. Jan's experience of it being used by white people, and her preference for working within a "women of colour" framework (and then my realisation that my opinion on the topic does matter, I'm just not there to be the chief organiser)
*my article that got used by SALP on privilege and volunteering

Chapters in my thesis

I've started thinking about how my thesis could be structured.

here are some ideas for chapters [the bits in square brackets could be omitted]:
*Being welcome [in the community]
*The object(ive) of pity
*Being tolerant
*Displaying "our" diversity

OK, so for some more fleshing out of these ideas:
Displaying our diversity:
*Clare traces the history of the "freak show," which historically displayed people from colonised countries, disabled people and other people who were physically unusual according to the standards of the viewers.
*Hevey (writing about disability imagery) and Clare both discuss charities through the concept of "Pity Festivals"
*Hage discusses multiculturalism as "zoology"
*Mardi Gras?
*Statements by public figures in the context of Midsumma about how Midsumma is exciting, but seems to be "for queers" in the most limited sense (c.f. the idea that queer is intended to move beyond essentialist categories of "gay" and "straight" and to be participatory)
*Statements by public figures in the context of Celebrate our Cultural Diversity Week, and perhaps Harmony Day, where multiculturalism is again "exciting"
*Bring in ideas from Corker, about how the internet may have been developed by autistics to have communicative devices that suit their purposes
*Merinda's cartoon about her applying for a job.
*Why Yooralla Week?

This section alone seems pretty much to be my thesis!

OK, so I'm going back to study now. xx

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Perlocution

OK, so today I read some Austin and Searle, which means nothing to most people, unless they are into the philosophy of language (or discourse or pragmatics). Anyway, these two write about what people DO with words. Blah. Not going to explain it all here except suffice to say they are pretty cool and have stimulated my thoughts :>

Anyway, I was thinking about my work while I was reading, and I was wondering how my ideas fit into the traditional structure as outlined by Austin and Searle of locution/illocution/perlocution.

Basically, the locution is the actual words of an utterance, the literal meaning; the illocution is the intended "meaning" and the perlocution is the intended effect on the hearer. So, e.g. "It's cold in here" has a literal meaning (an observation about the temperature) and it can be intended to function as a request (the illocution), and the speaker hopes the hearer will act on this request (perhaps by shutting the window that is open next to them, the perlocution). That's the text-book case, anyway.

Now, what I'm looking at is texts/utterances that function (amongst many other things) to exhibit the good intentions of the speaker and to position them as an advocate for a marginalised group. That is, the utterance has an effect on the public identity of the speaker.

Hmmm. Is this making sense to anyone but me? I'll give an example. Yooralla (a disability charity) said on a billboard: "Why Yooralla Week? Because this is our community" I think that in stating this "is our community", Yooralla is positioning itself as an advocate for disabled people, a good charity (perhaps one you should give money to). Moreover, it positions Yooralla as having what Hage calls "governmental belonging" - Yooralla presents itself as being in a position to claim and bestow belonging. Maybe this would be clearer if I compared Yooralla with an actor who clearly lacks this kind of belonging. For example, people who are currently detained in detention centres in Australia are not able to say "this is our community" with the same effect. It's very easy for people in power to refute this and say "no it's not, go back to where you came from/belong". The same may be true for Yooralla if there were bigots out there who disagreed in the social integration of disabled people, but Yooralla is claiming a position of authority in regards to conferring belonging.

On another note, ironically, in saying "this is our community", it becomes clear that disabled people have experienced the opposite - they have felt excluded from "the community". The statement vividly evokes the converse - that disabled people are unwelcome in the broader community. One only needs to declare the welcome of those whose welcome is questionable.

In White Nation, Hage brilliantly explores how White people construct themselves as being in the position to welcome/not welcome non-White people into the Australian community. He argues that even (especially) "tolerant multiculturalists" imagine themselves as having the power to decide who is welcome and under what conditions they are welcome. I think Hage's discussion is relevant to this text by Yooralla - Yooralla presents itself as welcoming disabled people, albeit this is somewhat ambiguous way (the blurry use of "our", which seems to equate Yooralla and disabled people, Yooralla constructs itself as simultaneoulsy working in the interests of disabled people, and as being one with disabled people.)

Wonder Ragz at Monash

On Monday I had some C.T.A. work out at Monash, so while I was there I dropped off some pads at Wholefoods. Someone emailed me back the next day and was really positive about them, and commented on the display case which is really exciting cos that was a baby of mine. I'm really happy with the whole new display arrangements. They look so much better.

I'm doing a market on Saturday with Allie; Nel and Bec and Monster Jen may well be coming too. And I got an email from the site today, so it all feels like it's all go again! YAY!

My new fitness regime

So i've been feeling tired and unfit for a few months now. I recently was inspired by one of my housemates, nellie, who has started skipping every night after work. the best exercise i've done in the past few years was a circuit class i was doing before circus last term (alas, the circuit class got cut)

So, I do
*2 mins warm up run around the garden
*2 or 3 headstands (each time splitting then lowering my legs and using my tummy muscles to raise them again)
*10 handstands
*7 minutes stretching (focussing especially on stretching so I can do the splits one day)

Then I do 2 minutes each of:
*squats
*shuttle run
*push ups
*skipping
*lunges
*shuttle run
*tricep dips
*sit ups

Then, finally, I do 5 minutes of a circus skill. Both times so far, I've done juggling, but I think I'll also give myself the option of hula hooping or poi. And maybe I'll think of more things too :>

It's been fun so far - it's pretty minimal in terms of time and commitment, but still feels good afterwards. We'll see how long it lasts :>

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

welcome molly cocoa and pearl

alice (the chook) seemed so lonely without her buddy betty, who seems to have left us for hopefully another happy home. so last weekend jan and i drove out to macclesfield (aka woop woop) and picked up two new chookens.

one is quite pale and has white spots on her neck, and her name is pearl. the other is quite dark, her name is molly cocoa. they were both 18 weeks when we got them.

i thought at first that pearl was going to be the bottom of the pecking order (alice was inevitably going to be the head chook), but it seems that molly isn't exactly the full quid, and she seems to be the bottom.

we clipped their wings straight away, but molly was keen to fly out of the coop (maybe she's not so silly, actually). i found her perched on top of the coop wall, with jess barking up at her. hmmm. scary first day.

anyway, so i worked on finally putting a roof on the coop. no more stress that they'll decide to fly away. i was really keen for it not to look like a cage - repress that truth - and i wanted them to have some shelter and some sun. so i scrounged around the yard and found a huge piece of shade cloth and some chicken wire. i went down to bunnings and got myself some more chicken wire and spent a day hammering and piecing bits together. jan helped with the tricky bits. it looks great - i'm real proud of it. the girls seem happy enough too.

today we spent about 3 hours together in the garden - me reading, them pecking around. they are starting to act as a flock, rather than as a brazen lone chicken and two scared little chooks.

i timed it well, cos it's now pouring with rain again. i spent some time during my lunch break planting endive, kale and coriander. the seedlings will love being rained in properly :>

left and right wing family values

an idea that i keep circling around is the idea of the family in politics.

i come at it from two angles - firstly "love makes a family" and "we are family" (a la Mardi Gras) in queer community. i certainly call jan and jessie (and the chooks) my family. against us are those who preclude us from their "family values"

the second is George Lakoff's book "Don't think of an elephant", which argues that conservatives and progressives each frame the world in terms of different images of the ideal family - conservatives imagine a scary world with a patriarch protecting the family; progressives trust children and nurture them.

i've been reading Hage's White Nation (which is absolutely f*cking brilliant, if you ask me, i'm so excited by it). he talks about White nationalism, and argues that there are more similarities than differences between exclusionary nationalism (like Pauline Hanson) and tolerant multiculturalism. He argues that both enact a fantasy of White managerial control over the nation - "you can live here, they can be there, but we don't want them over there." It's a brilliant argument, and I find myself almost highlighting whole pages - the detail is so thorough.

anyway, so these two ideas are starting to come together in my head. i think that those who think in a family metaphor (ie progressives and conservatives) are those who see it as their business to control the nation - paternal and maternal figures of different varieties. both believing that it is their duty/right to control.

then i started thinking about all the different forms of parental control (none of these are meant to be devaluing observations, I'm just trying to understand the dynamics) - feminists who want to enact stricter laws in the areas of pornography or prostitution, charity workers who want to help the "starving children of Africa", strong leaders who "protect" us from terrorism, leaders who endeavour to protect us from censorship ... and not just these, also progressives who argue that we should speak in a particular way about particular issues (we need guidance) ...

anyway, and then i got thinking about consumer/carer politics (e.g. in mental health groups, carer lobbyists are predominantly fathers of schizophrenics), and the literal and symbolic parental dynamics there (ie carers have typically fought for better services, consumers for a voice).

Something that Hage argues that is striking a very loud chord in my head at the moment, is the idea that those who wish to manage multiculturalism (or arguably any other form of diversity) silence those they are managing, objectifying them. This resonates really loudly for me, and links up with some writing I've done on the politics of volunteering. ... anyway, it's study time for this bug.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

new proposed title

My new proposed title is:

Defending the Other or Confronting Normality?

I'm enjoying the double-meaning of "confronting" - both the verbal sense of challenging, and the adjectival sense of difficulty, struggle. This latter sense is pretty much what I'm advocating - a constant process of challenging dominant, homogenising, Othering processes that devalue diversity, including "progressive" discourses that try to normalise and tame the Other, instead, I advocate pushing the boundaries to acknowledge the breadth of human diversity.

In my more confrontational moments, I consider taking on the more stigmatised aspects of each of the categories I'm analysing, for example taking on S/m or "bug chasing" behaviour within queer culture, or "radical" Islamist clerics, or anti-social personality disorder. Although many mouth the rhetoric of tolerance, everyone draws lines, finding certain practices/identities abhorrent. I think that we often choose to put our heads in the sand, pretending that queers are all very respectable, Muslims are docile, and people with mental illnesses are pitiable. I suspect that the word "radical" (as opposed to moderate) often serves to delineate acceptable from not. Which amuses me, because my history in radical feminism - and my affiliation with radical environmentalism - means that I appreciate radical thought for how it sees itself, as taking ideas to their logical conclusion, with full integrity. To use the word "radical" as a simple perjorative is deeply misguided.

Anyway, this post is going off track (that's why i blog after all, to be able to weave along whatever track takes my fancy) ...

WonderRagz are GO

Over the past fortnight or so, I've put a bit of energy into my Ragz. I made a display case that looks great! And I've repacked my stock into cellophane bags (that are biodegradable and look SO much better than the snap-locks I was using). Now I just have to print out the new labels I made (that don't have the name of the material, and have a simple tick-a-box option for sizing) and seal the packages with them. Oh, and I plan to make a stack more, especially maxis (I only have one left).

Then, the next stage is to make a few more display cases, for places where I plan to sell them. The case I have made looks small, but in fact stores a huge number of them. So, I know now that the case needs to be heaps smaller for places that will have less stock. And I've started making this really cute banner for my stalls - I've cut out little pads, that look SO cute!

So, it's all GO!

Political handywoman

I just looked up Suzanne Pharr on the internet, cos she wrote the foreword for Eli Clare's awesome book Exile and Pride. Anyway, Pharr describes herself with the wonderful term "political handywoman", explicitly choosing to identify not as an expert, but with the blue-collar label "handywoman." I think that's neat. I'm not sure how much she charges organisations for her services - I'd hope that her practice matches her rhetoric!

Sunday, April 22, 2007

My learning style

Today I've been exploring my "learning style" as part of the "Postgrad Essentials" course I'm doing. The test was pretty cool - it asked questions and I was often amazed at how clear my answers were. Anyway, here were my results:

Active/Reflective: I was 7 points in the direction of Reflective (that's a "moderate preference");
Sensory/Intuitive: I was 9 points in the direction of Intuitive (that's a "strong preference");
Visual/Verbal: I was 3 points in the direction of Verbal (that's considered "well balanced");
Sequential/Global: I was 11 points in the direction of Global (that's a "very strong preference", in fact as strong as is possible!)

So, basically, I like working alone, intuitively and reflectively, and I like to connect what I'm doing all together. I reckon that pretty accurately represents how I am working at the moment!

It seemed to kinda hint at a lack of discipline too, which is perhaps true - a resistance to the hard slog of detailed, consistent work.

diversity

this is perhaps going to sound ridiculously obvious, but I was just searching around for possible conferences relevant to my interests, and i discovered an interdisciplinary conference that was about diversity and i realised that that is a broad descriptor of what i am researching. it's been frustrating trying to find what possible broad heading my interests would come under, and i knew it was interdisciplinary, but that's IT! of course, it's so much more specific than that - it's looking at the language of those who defend the stigmatised.

der. i know, it doesn't sound like a breakthrough, but it feels really grounding to interdisciplinary attention given to this issue, cos what i am doing is inherently interdisciplinary, it is really about diversity rather than being about race, or about mental health or about sexuality per se.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

why a blog?

so, last time i met with one of my supervisors, we agreed that i would give her a lit review on my readings on race. i haven't got a lit review on race to give her today. i've done a lot of reading and thinking, but haven't spent enough time writing up my reading.

my instinct was to castigate myself for being "behind" or "disorganised" or "lacking discipline" or whatever. i wondered what i could do - maybe apologise and reschedule our appointment, maybe whip together my notes or stay up late for a few nights and pull together what i could, putting life on hold for a while (e.g. last night i nearly cancelled on a comedy festival gig that i was seeing with friends, thankfully i didn't cos it was really good). in the past, this has pretty much been my solution, when an essay has been due and i've spent too much time reading and not enough time writing. i think it's meant that the quality of my writing has suffered, that it hasn't reflected the depth and breadth of my understanding and ideas.

and i realised that this is my PhD, and more than that, this is my life. i keep hearing the bit about it being my PhD, and an old lecturer once told me that the way you live during your honours year can set a template for the rest of your academic career. i bunked down for my honours year - largely because my partner had just died suddenly and i was grieving privately and my thesis was a convenient screen to hide behind. i regret some things that i didn't do that year, and i am not going to live that way again, especially since a PhD is a marathon not a sprint.

but this makes it sound like i'm justifying myself, defending my degree of commitment, when this isn't at all what i'm thinking. i am so immersed in my thesis, i am progressing in leaps and bounds, but the way that i am expressing myself is in my blog. i'm learning that the way that i approach my study is not to systematically organise my thoughts into neat categories, like "race" and "sexuality". i just flicked open one of my favourite books - a book that has been one of the most influential in my thinking in the past few years - Eli Clare's Exile and Pride. It's a personal, political interweaving of Clare's insights into disability (she has cerebral palsy), sexuality (she's queer), gender (she's gender-queer), race (she's white, her whole rural town was white), environmentalism (she articulates a wonderful environmental ethic), class (she's rural, mixed/working class, but moved to the city so that she could have queer activist community and employment opportunities), etc. a reviewer described her work as "a vision of broadbased and intersectional politics that can move us beyond the current divisions of single-issue movements." I emulate her breadth and connections.

The term "broadbased" is key - it isn't "breadth" in the sense of glossing over the specificities of each "issue" she discusses, it's very grounded in specific experience. But it acknowledges the inherent intersectionality of many "issues" that are too often discussed separately. The clearest example from her work is her discussion of the "freak show", which historically displayed people from colonised countries, people with disabilities, people with atypical sexual characteristics (e.g. intersex), developmentally disabled people, cojoined twins, people of short stature, etc, together as variations on the "freak." She explores how this show reinforced the "normality" and superiority of the viewers. She explores the contemporary manifestations of this historical grouping.

it reminds me of an idea someone expressed (i think it was either said or hage, i can't remember, but i'll find it when i put my notes from them onto computer) - about the idea of an array, a cataloguing, an assortment of people, e.g. the multicultural fair, where all the "different" foods and costumes are displayed, or (I would add) the DSM, where all the "different" pathologies and failings are laid out. He explored the way in which this process reduces diversity to managable proportions, produces the normality of those who are not part of the display, and I would argue even describes the conditions of normality by a process of contrast. For example, definitions in the DSM rely on an otherwise unarticulated sense of what is "normal behaviour". The "normality" of not stealing, for example, is articulated by contrast with kleptomania [even though stealing is routine in imperial cultures, but somehow the land and cultures of indigenous peoples can be stolen without that being defined as stealing].

something that i find really powerful is the identification of the pathological tendencies of "normal" society, the "insanity of normality" as Jensen constantly describes it. Perhaps pathological is not quite what i mean, i mean naming, describing normals, not leaving them unnamed, unexamined and thus natural. it reminds me of a car trip once i made with the other editors of Lesbian Network magazine (back in my lesbian feminist days). I was the only middle-class person in the car, the others were all working class, and they were discussing middle-class characteristics in a way that i had never previously experienced. i felt profoundly self-conscious and suddenly aware of my taking-for-granted the goodness of middle class habits. Specifically, they were talking about how "nice" middle class people can be, how fake this can be and how annoying such fakeness is.

anyhow, i think i'm digressing. i'm wanting to talk about why i'm blogging. i don't intend to write my thesis in the way i write my blog. of course not. that would be unacademic. but i do intend to explore my ideas in a grounded way on my blog. explore the ideas that don't fit neatly onto a microsoft word document with subheadings and clear references, or into an Endnote file. the writers i most admire (Eli Clare, Arundhati Roy, Derrick Jensen, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel, Edward Said, Ghassan Hage, and I just started flicking through Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/ La Frontera and I suspect she may join this list), Kate Millett ... OK this list is getting long) - they all blend their experiences of the world into their theorising. they understand and value their life experiences as knowledge.

i'm truly not sure how my thesis-writing will develop (the use of the future tense here is not entirely accurate, but what i have written so far is minimal) but i know that this process of blogging is allowing my ideas to develop, i am continually drawing on my reading and reflecting on it, and i desire to write every day.

acacias are hardy and molasses kills cabbage moth

so my newest garden lessons are that acacias are hardy - one of the chooks had severely damaged one of my new acacias (acacia myrtifolia), but CERES nursery staff assure me they are hardy and will recover. which is just as well cos they were out of stock and i wanted to grow one!

the other lesson i learnt on-site at the CERES market garden. Meg took me there this week, which at first seemed like a rather boring stuff-around kind of way to spend time, but once we got there was really awesome! Meg was giving a group of Muslim schoolgirls a lesson in organic market gardening - it was great to see these girls in hijab and long skirts shovel and rake compost and then scatter seeds. the most amusing point was when one of the girls said to her teacher "miss, can we take off our skirts" - of course, they were all wearing pants underneath, but i was ignorant of this fact and wondered about the extreme contrast of total covering one minute, stripping the next. under their school outer clothes, many of them were wearing fashionable clothes and they were comparing labels, prices and the availability of "cool" clothes in their local shopping centres. i enjoyed the experience.

anyway, back to the gardening lesson. i wondered how they controlled cabbage moth (which is wreaking havoc with my brassicas at the moment). they spray the leaves with a teaspoon of molasses and a teaspoon of detergent mixed in a litre of water. the molasses kills the caterpillars (which eat the leaves) and the detergent keeps the molasses on. So i came home and sprayed my brassicas. fingers crossed :>

post Varekai musings

Last night i had a free ticket to check out Varekai - the Cirque du Soleil show. WOW! My jaw was on the floor for most of the show. I almost forgot to clap at some points, it was just so incredible. There was a guy juggling huge balls and doing the craziest stuff- like at one point he had a stick and two balls, he caught the stick in his mouth and then got one ball from his foot onto the stick and then the second ball on top of the first (also from his foot). Even cooler were the acro guys juggling each other (the flier would be in a headstand on the bases feet, then tossed in the air, and landing again); or the 3 little boys who juggled while doing backflips in sync; or the young woman in the sparkly costume (pretty!) who contorted her body into the most flinch-worthy positions. Or the stacks of three people standing on each other's shoulders ... no my favourite was the net/tissue act. this guy used a diamond shaped net like a tissue/rope, wrapping himself in it, wrapping and falling like a tissue act, climbing up it, while extending it like wings. I don't do it justice here, it was mesmerising and I've never seen anything like it. There was also a cool double-trapeze act that was fun to pick out tricks in (having done a very modest amount of trapeze, and an even more modest amount of triple).

So, anyway, it got me thinking about how I can keep doing aerials but ditch the class. So I came up with the idea of doing beginners aerials (it's a big class) - I know it's a bit of a regression and part of my pride is railing against it, but apart from that it's such a good idea (sorry pride, I'm not ignoring you)! And then today i found out that my acro class has been cancelled, which sucks cos it's the one i'm most excited about! hannah is trying to recruit, but i'm resigned to possibly hooking into the intermediate class (which is also on friday). I think that might be pretty cool - beginner's aerials (thursday) and intermediate acro (friday). not sure about conditioning on mondays though ... 3 circus nights a week is a bit full on. but that said, i am wanting to get my fitness back up and circus seems to be the only thing i actually sho up for!