Red Without Blue: Since when did LGBT stand for Lesbian- and Girl-Bashing Tolerance?!

the poster image is from here

Please note: this blog post was significantly revised on Jan. 1 and 2, 2011.
You may see *this related post on Queer Politics*.
Also please note that there are links to be able to view this film in its entirety. They appear later in this post along with a more legible list of the awards this film has received.
 
There's plenty of anti-lesbian privilege and "progressive" girl-bashing going on in Het and Queer communities and it's not being called out much. The dignity of women who lived their childhoods as girls is no longer regarded as of value in Queer community; I doubt it ever was. From my earliest memories, lesbian feminist political agendas were radical, while white gay men's political agendas were conservative to liberal. Things haven't changed in the last thirty to forty years; and what's gotten worse is that radical feminism has been made into a dirty word--or, well, two words. Men still defend and protect their man-given right to be misogynists, to habitually and institutionally reinforce their male supremacist entitlements, and to make sure their masculinist privileges don't go away any time soon.

How do you know white Queer politics are anti-woman? When radical lesbian feminist politics are regarded as anti-queer.

Here's but one example from North American media.

A darling of white-majority Queer film-fests, Red Without Blue is a documentary about racism, classism, and misogyny, including anti-lesbian misogyny. The problem is that the filmmakers and people focused on this documentary don't seem to notice or care that this movie promotes these values and practices in the name of "pro-trans/queer politics".

As one intergender person who is unapologetically pro-radical, pro-feminist, anti-racist, and pro-Indigenist, I reject misogyny, anti-lesbianism, and racism as prerequisites for Queer agendas of social [non-]transformation. If covert and overt racism and misogyny must exist for white Queer culture to exist, then white queer liberalism is about the same thing as WHM conservatism: oppressive and repressive: certainly for all people who are not wealthy, white, and male.

In Red Without Blue we have, yet again, the unquestioned presentation of white middle class people as THE spokespeople on trans and queer issues, as the crucible in which we learn about something called "humanity", as if "humanity" is most apparent there, and not anywhere else. This white nuclear reactive family's story is so loaded up with class, race, and gender privileges, and layered with typically classed and raced dysfunction that it's a wonder this film is heralded by so many Queer/LGBT filmfests as honest and painfully beautiful. Then again, given how white and male supremacist Queer/LGBT dominant and alternative media often are, perhaps it's no wonder at all.

Here's a synopsis of the film's plot lines along with my commentary:
Two white twins, both gay males, grow up in a het home broken by divorce. Their father leaves but is still in the lives of his sons, more or less. The twins become drug addicts, are raped, and try and commit suicide. This is not a happy story and it's a story too many of us know--these dysfunctional responses to pain and socially protected forms of terrorism are commonplace, the norm, and unremarkable if also horrible.

The fact that neither parent really has time for either of these boys is obviously a central issue in the pain they endure and almost don't survive. But they survive the suicide attempt and one of them later decides to transition from a man to a woman. Not because the male twin believes they're a woman. No. That's not the reason: that this isn't questioned more by anyone is a bit of a problem, to me. It's a problem because it means that one is left considering doing something that is quite dangerous and not at all required to bring someone closer to who they say they believe, deep down, they are.

The twin who wishes to transition finds the most understanding and support not from the twin brother but rather from another class-privileged white person raised only as a boy And the exchanges between them are so overtly misogynistic and grossly male privileged that it made me want to scream out at them for their vile unmitigated woman-hatred. The other twin, who remains a gay man, seeks relationship and travel abroad, finding value in each and leaving his sibling to figure out what to do about being transgender.

Here, in this story, is something that is not questioned by anyone in the film or by contemporary queer community in my experience: the assumption that someone who is male is entitled to appropriate some kind of surgical semblance of "a woman's body". Beyond the dominant cultural transphobia that anyone seeking to do this is likely to encounter, we are not led by the people filmed or the filmmaker to ask anything else about this--if a male person wants to have breast implants or to have some sort of pseudo-vagina and vulva fashioned out of penile and scrotal tissue, we are all supposed to nod affirmatively that this is, unquestionably, a socially good thing to do because what the effect is on women as a class can never, ever matter as much as the needs and wishes of people with male privilege--male privilege trumps radical lesbian feminist women's wishes, wants, or dignity in contemporary racist patriarchies like those found across dominant North America.

And so objections to males appropriating women's body parts in the most superficial surgical ways, if questioned or challenged as "a right" at all, is to render the questioner--the woman--grossly transphobic. We may note that someone with male privileges and entitlements to appropriate women's bodies is not challengeable as grossly misogynistic. Who cares if they're called a misogynist anyway? Not many males I know. They just deny it and move on. Never mind that misogyny and anti-lesbianism (more on this later) is so thick in this film you can cut it with a dull plastic knife.

What ISN'T misogynistic about endeavoring to put "female parts" on a male's body? We're collectively not allowed to ask that question without being branded a bigot. Males get to do what they want, to the extent we are able to do so, and heteropatriarchal society will assist males in doing whatever we want as long as we cough up the bucks. That's one point made in this movie. And once again, it's not a point the filmmaker is intending to convey.

Where's the "painful beauty" of two white middle class young adults--the twin who is transitioning and the friend who has already done so, who were raised with plenty of structural male power even if they each were marginalised socially for being queer or nerdy--having a conversation about how gross and disgusting vulvas are, while one uber-privileged transsexual supports another shopping for them? Yes, "shopping", like one would for a car or an iPad.

Note the complete ignorance of what being female is, socially and physically, on the part of our main character, Clair, who believes that to really understand what vulvas look like, one must view pimped images of raped women's bodies--as if images of women pimped by men are not retouched--in every violating and contemptuous way imaginable.

Note how this very male supremacist person, the one who doesn't believe they are a woman, is utterly repulsed at the sight of a FAKE vulva (to our knowledge, Clair has never, ever seen an actual woman's genitals in a non-exploitive context). Note that the repugnance is not even at seeing an actual human vulva as such an organ appears on someone who has not had surgery, but is, instead, elicited by being shown a graphic photograph of  the post-op transsexual person's crotch; is this scene, for trans people, not grossly transphobic? How does one show someone an image of their own body and have someone recoil saying "GROSS" and feel respected by that? There's no indication that anything disrespectful has happened to anyone at all--particularly women raised as girls.

Instead this person with the photographic image of their surgically reconstructed groin tells Clair how happy they were to have it done. We are made to believe that the process is easy--kind of a breeze, really: this process of having ones male genitals removed and a semblance of mostly external female genitals fashioned in their place. In M2F sex-reassignment medical parlance, it's called "bottom surgery".

For whom is this really no big deal? It's not that I think having one's penis and testicles lobbed off ought to be regarded as the highest of cardinal sins; although to be honest, I do think one ought to be made to consider the ramifications of this being done with someone more mature than a person who can laugh with you about how gross vulvas look.

I don't assume that we all feel great affection or affiliation with our bodies. There are many complex reasons for this. Many, many women hate their bodies and do many things--including getting surgery if they can afford it to change the shape and size of various areas of their bodies. Many girls and women also starve themselves to try and get rid of secondary sexual characteristics, from breast tissue to thigh and buttock tissue, and to stop menses. Some women cut their flesh with sharp objects or burn themselves. Body self-hatred is to being female in Western patriarchal societies what penis-worship among men is in the same societies; it is for this reason that some might find Clair's decision to pursue "bottom surgery" objectionable. Some of those who do object, I believe, are located within trans and intergender community. I am one such person but I am not alone. The fact that I have many of the privileges Clair has means that I can speak with a voice that will be regarded as "comprehension-worthy" in a way that people without my privileges will not be listened to so carefully by whites, males, and class-privileged people.

We do not live in a world that promotes girls and women loving their bodies. Mark this down as an early "understatement of the year" for 2011. That so many women with financial means seek to alter their bodies is one clue of this social disdain and denigration. A solution to this social-political problem is not to promote more surgery. It is to promote the end of the institutions and industries which manufacture woman-hating.

It's not that I can't imagine wanting to dissociate completely from a part of oneself that one increasingly doesn't identify as "who I am". But who among us gets to act out this level of dissociation by seeking out surgery? Not most trans people across the globe who will never have the funds necessary to pay a doctor to do it. And who among us gets to have medically necessary non-trans surgeries to repair the physical/genital harm of being sexually violated and injured. Most girls and women who are not trans don't usually get to have access to the experience a few wealthy-enough males who seek sex-reassignment surgery get to have.

This isn't an argument for not allowing someone to have surgery to remove parts of their body. But it is an argument about what people who have been raised as boys--including those of us who didn't identify with being boys--ought to call ourselves. This is an argument about those of us who were born male and grew up into adulthood with structural and social male privileges and entitlements. It's an ethical and political argument about those of us who later, after reaching adulthood, have various medical and surgical procedures done to re-assign our sex. My argument has to do with what we are, socially and politically when that process is completed--or not. This ethical argument is built on this premise, which is, in reality, an institutionalised, globalised practice: we live in a world in which female bodies are medically and socially violated as standard operating procedure. In this world, always in this context--never outside of it--a very few number of class-privileged people raised as boys get to shop around for the kind of vulvas and breasts they want to own, physiologically, to pass as "a woman", as if "a woman" is only someone who has socially noticeable breasts and something between their legs that looks enough like what pornographers' photograph to get prospective het men to believe its "a real vagina". The argument is that surgery doesn't construct a person into being a woman; male supremacist social power, including routine sexual terrorism, does.

If this wasn't a documentary I'd simply call out the writer of the film for scripting a grossly misogynistic, classist, and racist screenplay. But since this is not scripted, I've got to call out the two white middle class people in this movie--Clair and her transsexual friend--for revealing for all of us who view the film how virulently misogynistic and absolutely objectifying of women's bodies male-privileged people can be, even those who demand to be considered women by family and society. It's not like they didn't know cameras were rolling when they were discussing this. Their level of callousness to girls and women who are not trans who might watch this is astounding to me--or, well, it would be except that's the level of callousness I've come to expect from most people raised as as boys.

There's some honesty here in this movie about gender in the West. As mentioned briefly already, Clair acknowledges (a few times) not feeling like a man or a woman. So why shop around for fake female genitals? What are the sexual politics and signs of entitlement infused with THAT course of action? Who is this person wanting to be, and for whom? Why is Clair feeling profoundly loved and unconditionally accepted by their father because he is willing to pay for Clair to have a fake vulva surgically constructed where male genitals are? Shall we not question the misogyny of the father, in assuming his purchase of something that looks sort of like a vulva, but isn't one at all, is a blessed gesture of fatherly love? I am reminded of the parents who permit teenage girls to get breast implants and nose jobs. Sure, the kids feel loved by the parents who let them. But is that really what love is? I sure hope not. What that is, is this: the misuse of money to replace real relationship; the use of purchasing "things" to replace putting in the time it takes to have intimate and solid connection with ones children. That dad checked out earlier and feels awful about his twin boys almost killing themselves--might this be a motivation for him wanting to pay for one of his children to have "bottom surgery"? Are we allowed to ask him? Are we allowed to ask this at all? Isn't this what capitalist parents do, who have the means to do it: buy the love of their children?

How do we conclude that dis-identifying with ones own male genitals leads us to shopping for surgeons who can manufacture vulva-like flesh? In what social world which values any level of personal authenticity does obtaining a fake vulva make you the woman you repeatedly say you aren't? Clair is not only NOT a woman-identified person; Clair is a seriously misogynist male supremacist non-female person who feels trapped in a gender-binaried world and seeks solutions that reinforce the binary Clair is trapped inside.

Were I Clair's friend, I'd say: "Clair, welcome to our anti-queer, woman-hating world. Now, what can we do to fight male supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and stop the degradation and mass production of women's body parts seen to be and made into things to be thoroughly exploited, violated, and exchanged in the male supremacist marketplace? How can you find some peace within yourself, given the emotional and sexual trauma you've endured?"

Even her twin brother, it seems, cannot approach speaking about their rapes. And so no one appears to be interested in tending to that horrendous wound. Instead, let's find doctors to replace parts that we no longer wish to have be part of us.

It's a strange time we live in, for those of us who live in places where such surgical solutions to emotional and political problems are promoted as healthy and are not objected to as blatantly woman-hating.

And then there's the "Driving Miss Daisy" scene, with our protagonist, Clair, being chauffeured around by a man of color who drives a cab: yes--chauffeured. She rents his services to drive her everywhere claiming he's a really good friend. It is obvious that Clair is completely clueless about the blatant racism and classism being promoted as perfectly acceptable behavior. There's no social awareness here evidenced by these actions of our white trans exploiter. This is about as gross a display of classism and racism I've seen in any allegedly progressive movie, heralded as such by one white male supremacist queer film festival after another.

And additional dimension of classism shows up when we find out the twins' father was out of work for months but pretended to be going to work each day, out of the house. How did this family survive economically? Were this a poor or working class family, such an act would have meant terrifying peril. How is it that the white man of the house, who, to our knowledge, is a primary "bread-winner" can not work for months and yet the family still survives exactly as if he is working all along? This unaddressed question may perhaps be seen a being beyond the scope of the film, but if you understand the film to be about how class, region, gender, and race all coalesce in each of our lives to promote or protect various realities, then this is a relevant question. He does go on to use his money to assist Clair in her gender-journey in a few key ways: all of them medical or surgical.

As if all that weren't way too much, we also have the Christian mother of these twins living with--as in sharing her bed with--another white Christian woman, but they state clearly THEIRS IS NOT A LESBIAN RELATIONSHIP. Got it. They're Good Christian White Women sharing a bed and apparently are keeping enough space between them for Jesus to keep them good, and holy, and what? Straight?

The class, hetero/sexist, and white anti-lesbian privileges reek to high heaven throughout this film.

One of the entitlements of the most privileged among us is that we get to name ourselves and define ourselves, because if we're atop class, gender, and race hierarchies, we don't have those dominant groups above us telling us who we are. This whole matter of deciding what gender or sexual orientation someone is comes with various degrees of privilege; let's not forget that millions of queer kids, including me, were told what we were from childhood on, and the terms weren't pretty.

We were told what we were and we internalised the sexual shame and gender degradation to our humanity that the bullies' news was delivered on. The shame, for me, to be clear, wasn't being called a girl. Being called a sissy did sting; being called a f*ggot hurt a lot. To endure verbal abuse and other forms of mistreatment was degrading. But to be called "a girl" was flattering. The shame was in being systematically targeted for humiliating verbal and physical assault by boys who were perpetrating pricks.

And speaking of perpetrating pricks, there is a rapist in this film's story too. A slightly older gay man who rapes both twins repeatedly, also rapes another child, a boy who at the time of his assault was younger than they were. They witnessed this child's assault--they witnessed him come out of a bathroom where the man raped him. They witnessed him be curled up with a terrified and distant look in his eyes. The obviously traumatised, terrified boy didn't wish to prosecute. I can understand why. I doubt I'd have had the strength or will to prosecute the man who sexually assaulted me when I was twelve. I get not being able to prosecute someone you want to never think about again--let alone be face to face with.

But the gay male twin presents this as a reason why the twins couldn't do anything to hold the rapist accountable. Why not? He raped both of them? If the younger child didn't want to be part of the case, that's up to him. But there are other assaults here to report: their own. But that never gets discussed beyond it being a story of gross exploitation and abuse of emotionally needy and terribly vulnerable queer kids. It does make a compelling argument for why it is gay male adolescents are more vulnerable to sexual assault by men that het ones. We are vulnerable to men who are out as gay or by men who are just interested in abusing young people regardless of gender. And lest we forget--and most males I know who are deeply concerned about the sexual abuse of boys often do--surrogate or biological father-daughter incest remains the most common form of child sexual abuse.

How do these assaults shape each of the twin's lives? The rapes, in this film, exist in a social-psychic vacuum. We are not to question whether there's any relationship between someone getting sexually assaulted and wanting to have their genitals removed. While this is a question we are not encouraged to ask, I'm going to answer it: I wanted to dissociate from my genitals after being sexually assaulted. I am asexual today because of that need for dissociation. I once very seriously contemplated having sex-reassignment surgery. Were it not for radical lesbian feminist understandings of assault and the aftermath, or were I to grow up, through my teens and twenties, now instead of when I did (at a time when radical lesbian feminist perspectives flourished and were regarded as wisdom not just as bigotry), I'd likely be out as transsexual instead of out as pro-radical feminist. It wasn't just that I dis-identified with my male genitals. I also identified more with women's genitals in some ways.

A woman--someone who grew up as a girl--once called me out on the misogyny of me fantasizing about having female genitals. From my mid-teen years on, I fantasized about having a vulva and vagina, and of being able to possibly seduce teen het guys and later het men, to have sex with me: PIV sex, as it is sometimes termed online. Penis-in-vagina. I wanted that. I never really desired anal intercourse with men. What I wanted was for men to penetrate me vaginally.

But a few years ago, one woman dared to speak up about how this was typical of men (or, in my case, an intergender male): to appropriate and fantasize about having parts of women's bodies as if they aren't parts of women's bodies. As if the parts all belong to men or to males, to try on, to violate, to appropriate, to exploit, to fantasize about, and, when possible, to rent or to purchase and possess. To do whatever with, other than respecting that female genitals are parts of women's bodies which are whole, part of a girl-to-woman's physical-psychic-emotional-social-political-spiritual being, not a collection of fetishised parts as if from some pornographic Ms. Potato-Head game.

It's funny (although not ha-ha funny) how, even while intergender and allied with women politically, I never fantasized about menstrual cramps, missed periods, or the dangers of contracting HPV (in terms of being more likely to develop cervical cancer), or the problems of endometriosis or ovarian cysts. No, I got to pick and choose which aspects of "having a female body" would most meet my needs, my very male supremacist needs. I also wanted to be able to breast-feed a baby, but not worry about breast cancer.

I want to publicly thank that radical feminist woman for calling me out. I doubt she's welcome me to tell you her name. But if she's reading this, she surely knows I'm acknowledging her act of truth-telling to me and for demonstrating what solidarity with girls and women sounds like.

To indulge the kinds of fantasies I was having, without considering what that said about my own male supremacist understandings of women's bodies, was grossly misogynistic of me.

We don't get to talk about such things in Queer community, in my experience. The dudes don't really want to talk about our male supremacist entitlements to appropriate and misuse representations of women, including in fantasy, in stage performance, as well as directly using and abusing actual women.

We who are male also don't generally want to discuss being molested and raped by men; not that women love doing so--but women have broken down the barriers to being able to discuss sexual violence and abuse against girls and women. I believe one function of gay and bi (and, of course, HET) males not readily discussing how abused some of us were by men is that we want to protect the rights of men to be abusive to everyone else, including to children.

No one is allowed, currently, to question why it is someone who is a survivor of sexual trauma and violation might dissociate from their own bodies--especially the aspects of our bodies associated most with "sex"--which is what the predators and assaulters always believe they're having. How does being sexually abused, when the victim is male, combine with male privileges and entitlements to use women? Is this not one of many elephants in the room of the movie?

So of course white- and male-dominated Queer and non-Queer film festivals are heralding Red Without Blue as an unproblematic cinematic and social success story. Because dominant Queer political agendas can only exist in their liberal ways if they are white and male supremacist. And classist as hell. And not held to account for any of it. Just because a movie reveals some of the emotional complexities we face as trans and intergender people, or as queer people who are neither, doesn't make it painfully honest enough if the oppressive power and entitlements exercised by characters in a film are rendered completely invisible.

To all my Queer sibs:
Please call out the classism, the racism, and the misogyny (including the anti-lesbian misogyny), of the rampant white and male supremacy, and of the denial of what child sexual assault and gross emotional neglect does to us, including in Queer and Trans communities. It is emotionally neglectful of the most silenced among us to support each other going to the dominant industries and institutions that were designed to harm us--such as the Academy, the military, prostitution, pornography, psychiatry, and surgery, without noting how each will seek to disallow radical, revolutionary interrogations and challenges to society and one another, and how each exist to maintain the heterosexist, gynocidal, and genocidal status quo.

From what I find in correspondence with non-queer women and with trans and queer people without many privileges: queer and trans people who are living in poverty; people who are working class or who are not living with "First World" protections from government warfare; people of color who are not living with white protections from prison and police brutality; people who are marginalised, ostracised, abused and neglected not just inside dominant English-speaking white society, but within one's society of origin; and girls and woman globally across class, region, ethnicity, and race who are targeted for abuses specific to that class of people.

What I find is that the less privileged among us can't afford to pay the price of our too often willful ignorance of our own abuses of power and support of systems of harm and atrocity that the main characters in Red Without Blue demonstrate. The twins in this movie will never have to encounter the systematic abuses and forms of neglect (such as not being regarded as human or socially existent due to one's skin color or ethnic heritage) up-close and personal, let alone as members of a religious, regional, political, or ethnic group, as people of color do, as Jews do, as Muslims do, and as Indigenous people and women of all colors and sexualities do.

The people in this movie do go about living their very classist lives: they discover "who they are" as they move around from North America to Europe and back again as they please, or by jumping across the U.S. to live in NYC or San Francisco because of course "people" can just do that to improve their education or enhance their sense of "being in the world" that is "ours".

Not just any people: only class- and region-privileged ones, folks. And those of us who are part of a those privileged communities need to ask ourselves: with that kind of privilege, to move into other people's places with the assumption that we get to try out belonging and possibly staying wherever we decide to go--a privilege not afforded most poor people of color who don't speak English as a first language, and not afforded most immigrants of color in the white West either--what do we also assume can be ours for the taking or ours to inhabit indefinitely? How about parts of women's bodies as well as their identities?

"Woman" is a political category born of patriarchally atrocious actions committed day by day and night by night against people who live in female bodies from birth to death. Some of those women's bodies are intersex, surgically altered in infancy or childhood or later to "appear" more female. The intersex activists I know vehemently object to surgical interventions to make intersex people fit the oppressive gender binary.

I am calling on those of us who are intergender, intersex, and otherwise gender non-conforming, queer, or transgender, female, male, or neither, to stand in solidarity with women raised as girls in identifying their political identities as theirs. Because theirs is the identity of being girls-then-women who are never structurally privileged with male entitlements to take what they want and go where they want; theirs is the social identity that combines with a physical-political body for men to degrade and use as sexxx-things, nursemaids, housekeepers, and child rearers by thinking of them as parts not ever comprising a whole human being, beginning on day one and ending at the point of cremation or burial, if lucky or respected enough to be buried after death.

I am asking that we honor our sisters as we honor ourselves, in all our complexity, by working however we can, in alliance, to rid this world of male supremacist entitlements to disproportionately and specifically abuse and appropriate female human beings and coercively, shamingly, or violently rob them of their capacity to say "NO!" to accommodating anyone else's wishes, needs, or demands, or to name who they are as a specifically oppressed gendered group: girls and women.

We know the abusers, intimately, interpersonally, institutionally, and industrially are by and large, across the globe, wealthy men, white men, and non-queer men. Let us break all alliance and allegiance with those groups of men and any others who defend and protect misogyny, and stand instead with girls and women as they define themselves and as they continue to resist globalised racist patriarchal oppression.

*          *          *

Here are two places online to view the documentary in full:

http://www.logotv.com/video/misc/421930/red-without-blue-part-1-of-8.jhtml?id=1638533


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzO11m6WBPQ

From IMDb. Please click on the title to link back.

Awards forRed Without Blue (2007)

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Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ohio, USA
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Documentary Film Award	Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Barcelona International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Jury Award	Best Documentary Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Chicago Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Best Documentary	Brooke Sebold
Dublin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Audience Award	Best Documentary Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Jury Award	Best Documentary Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Rhode Island International Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Second Prize	Alternative Spirit Benita Sills Brooke Sebold Todd Sills
San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Documentary Award	Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Slamdance Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Audience Award	Best Documentary Feature Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Jury Award	Best Documentary Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills
Toronto Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival
Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
2007	Won	Audience Award	Best Documentary Brooke Sebold Benita Sills Todd Sills

Censored News from 2010 ECD: Indigenous Rights and Activism; U.S. and White Western Terrorism, Torture, and Tyranny; and more

image is from here

This is an invaluable 2010 ECD year-end post, from Censored News. Thanks, as always, through the years, to Brenda Norrell. Please click on the title just below the date, to link back to Brenda's news blog.

Friday, December 31, 2010

Censored in 2010: Defense of Mother Earth, the racist right, US torture and collapse of the media

(Photo: Dine Water Rights/march 2010)

By Brenda Norrell/Censored News/http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com
 

What was censored in 2010 on the issues of Indigenous Peoples and human rights? Due to the collapse of the media and the proliferation of the racist right, there's too much to print, but here are ten of the most censored issues.

1. The United States -- the last country in the world to support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples -- fooled many people when President Obama announced the US would support the Declaration. However, the US did not "endorse," "adopt," or "sign on" to the Declaration. The US only announced "support," and attached a lengthy list of limitations from the US State Dept.

2. None of the elected Native American leaders from the United States joined Bolivian President Evo Morales in his push for new global standards to protect Mother Earth at the climate summits in Cochabamba or Cancun. Carbon trading scams continued, allowing the worst global polluters to continue to pollute. Even though coal-fired power plants are a leading cause of global warming and destruction in the Arctic habitat of wildlife, the Navajo Nation continued to push for another coal fired power plant, Desert Rock. Other Indian Nations continued the push for oil and gas drilling and other polluting industries. The Navajo Nation gave away Dineh water rights in Arizona and uranium mining companies continued to target Navajo, Lakota and other Indian lands.

3. The proliferation of the racist right fueled anti-migrant hysteria in Arizona and elsewhere. Along the US Mexico border, profiteering from migrant prisons and border security contracts continued. The shooting deaths of American Indians by city and county police in Washington State, South Dakota, and elsewhere, along with the arrest in Virginia of a Mohawk film crew, exposed the malignant racism in US law enforcement. The white superiority mindset of the Ku Klux Klan continues in the US, both within white cloaks and police uniforms. It also continues in state legislatures, including Arizona, and in Indian bordertowns.

4. President Obama spent only about 30 minutes with the 12 Native American leaders invited to the White House, and only about 30 minutes with the 565 Native leaders invited to the Interior Building, during the White House Tribal Nations Conference in Dec. It was originally proclaimed as a welcome to the White House for all Indian leaders, last year. Again this year, the 565 Native leaders did not get that handshake and welcome to the White House.

5. The US State Dept. wasted a great deal of time and money of grassroots Native people by holding "Listening Conferences," on human rights issues in numerous locations in 2010. In the final US Periodic Review to the United Nations, almost all were ignored. Even the online State Dept. summaries were pathetic, lacking key names and issues.

6. The United States, George Bush and Dick Cheney, were not held responsible for US torture, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, in 201o. US drones continued to be used for rogue assassinations and the killing of civilians. The US continued the School of Americas, Guantanamo, secret black sites of torture and the training of military soldiers from other countries in torture.

7. The pathetic collapse of the news industry left the industry on life support. Many journalists became, or continued to be, armchair journalists. Some continued cheerleading for the US war in Afghanistan, urging young people toward death, for a bogus war, without examining the truth behind this war. Still others focused on divisive politics, or simply collapsed into the Internet, plagiarizing, rewriting press releases, and making a few phone calls.

8. While the US media pointed its clean white fingers at Mexico's drug war, few reporters pointed out that there would be no drug war in Mexico if it were not for the demand by US citizens for illegal drugs. Few reporters pointed out that the Zetas, the most notorious murderers in the cartels in Mexico, were originally trained as human killing machines of the US special forces.

9. US Border Patrol agents, immigration agents and the US military continue to smuggle drugs and weapons, and murder and rape, with impunity, along the US/Mexico border. The US Army Special Ops continues to post online its operating manual, showing that it provides weapons and support to guerrillas to destabilize governments, and continue war. Ultimately this means the US is responsible for killing its own citizens, along with other innocent women, children and elderly.

.

10: While global enforcement agencies focused on Wikileaks, rather than the perpetrators of the crimes, these agencies ignored the murdered and missing women and children in Canada, and the widespread global trafficking of women and children. Meanwhile, Wikileaks shed light on the white privilege mindset within the cables, as the US and its partner multi-national corporations continued to assassinate and make homeless Indigenous Peoples living on lands targeted for mining, dams and deforestation around the world.

Posted by brendanorrell@gmail.com

 

Is MTV Going Radical in 2011? A Response to Jessica Yee, in Support of Naming the Truth about the White West's Commitment to and of Genocide

image from MTV site may be found here

I posted the following after reading about an awesome cultural activist group, A Tribe Called Red, *here* at Racialicious. Apparently, MTV has taken an interest in promoting what they are doing to raise awareness about the disgusting levels of cultural appropriation (gross exploitation and theft) of Indigenous ways, known to be common practice among white nations. I agree with Jessica's critique of MTV. And I want to put more flame under MTV's buttocks. There's no way they'll promote anything like "cultural appropriation" as a problem if they also call it what it is: a racist patriarchal colonialist practice of genocide.

This is what MTV, the pro-exploitation reality TV network (formerly video channel), is saying about A Tribe Called Red. After that, is my comment. Please click on the title below to link back to MTV's blog.

Canada’s A Tribe Called Red Really Goes Native

By: Beverly

Ottawa, Canada-based Native American audio/visual collective A Tribe Called Red are remixing  pop culture from a first people’s perspective and it’s as right on and brilliant as a fashion shoot with emaciated European models in war bonnets is ignorant and lazy.

A Tribe Called Red Vimeo screen grab.

There are a fair number of young Native American writers taking to the web to explain all the ways that freely borrowing the cultural symbols of indigenous people — or bastardized fantasy versions thereof — is richly and complexly lame. Native Americans re-appropriating said pop culture images to make sick videos that go with even sicker dubstep remixes of tribal drum circles and stuff like “I’m An Indian Too” from Annie Get Your Gun is sort of the rad non-text version of those writings.

It’s so rad, in fact, that Diplo will probably post about you on his blog if you do it, but only if you do it as well as DJ Shub, DJ NDN, Frame, and video artist Bear Witness do. There’s also this second Native North American music post on the Mad Decent blog featuring A Tribe Called Red’s Electric Pow Wow Mini Mix. Electric Pow Wow, incidentally, is also the name of the crew’s monthly party.

Check out this Jim Jarmusch-sampling video by Bear Witness for DJ Shub’s “Electric Pow Wow Drum”:

Electric Pow Wow Drum from Bear Witness on Vimeo.


Oh, and before you go, check the video for the remix of the Diplo track “Riddim”:

Pow Wow Riddim from Bear Witness on Vimeo.

*          *          *

This is what I wrote as a comment at Racialicious.

I hope MTV will also note the obvious: the U.S. is committing genocide, still. And genocide across North America, and across the globe, is being willfully executed by corporate business, corporate media, and white het male supremacist military powers.

I network with Indigenous activists globally and what I am hearing goes way beyond cultural appropriation. It’s about land theft and refusal to return land to the people it was stolen from, it’s about the maintenance of poverty as a condition of living, it’s about poisoning the Earth, it’s about poisoning human beings. It’s about forced relocation and maintaining homelessness and loss of homeland as a condition of life. It’s about mass murder also but genocide isn’t only murder of human life as so many whites insist. It’s about the systematic destruction and erasure of human life, human cultures, human societies, and human history. It’s about burying corporate atrocities along with traditional ways of living, leaving no marker, no grave.

To not name it “genocide”, when speaking about what the White Het Man is doing to Indigenous Peoples in North America, is to render gross atrocity invisible. I hope we all start naming GENOCIDE wherever we see it, experience it, feel it, or witness people we love spiritually or physically die from it.

So many whites in the U.S. I know will go on and on and on and on about how awful Israel is behaving toward (read: against) the Palestinian people of the region for occupying land, relocating people, and committing mass murder. And, Israel is being utterly Western white male supremacist in doing this: nothing about their strategies of oppression are other than white-euro masculinist. (This is to say: it’s not a JEWISH thing that the Israeli government is doing.) Why don’t those same U.S.ers speak out against what THIS government, Christian-dominant since inception, is doing HERE and abroad to Indigenous People?

I'll add this, which wasn't part of my comment @ Racialicious:

Why are U.S. anti-racism liberals and progressives so fucking quiet about the genocide white U.S.ers benefit from materially, if not spiritually, every damn day?

Toward a Revolutionary Radical Queer Agenda

photo still of Honey, in the film Born in Flames, is from here

Revised on 15 January 2013.

Foreword to the post that follows:
This blog has historically done two things primarily: called out Western white het men's (WHM's) misogyny, racism, and heterosexism, and promoted the activist efforts of radical women of color, Indigenous women, and radical lesbian feminists (groups which are not mutually exclusive). I began to get criticism about my focus on, for example, heterosexual pornography--why would I not discuss gay pornography too? This is one response to that critique:
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2008/10/white-gay-men-marriage-and-prostitution.html

Over the two and a half years this blog has existed, I've increasingly realised how much of a waste of time and energy it is to try and get the most privileged people in society to be accountable to the atrocities they protect and defend as their "rights". I engage very seldom with WHM at this point. As I see it, there's little to no reason to do so: they don't care to listen, to engage, to be respectful, or to even acknowledge the depth and breadth of their power, privileges, and entitlements. If there are white het men who are radically anti-CRAP, let them take up the challenge to confront their brothers. It's not the job of queer and trans folks, women, and people of color (again, significantly overlapping populations), to educate straight folks, men, and whites, respectively.

In the last month or so, especially, I have begun a systematic examination and critique of dominant Western queer culture. Some of this critique has happened in conversation with Theory-Q at the blog Below The Belt. I have been in a process of coming out as intergender, and feel it is the obligation of those of us in trans/intergender circles to call one another out when misogyny, racism, and classism is present in our communities and conversations.

I tend to generate posts based on the issues which are before me and which make clear the relative positions of power various social groups have; it has never been the contention of this blog that anti-feminist, anti-radical transgender women occupy a more oppressive location over and against radical lesbian feminists than do dominant pro-CRAP cisgender men, for example. Nor is my belief that white M2F trans people are oppressed by cis women of color, or by cisgender lesbians, feminist or not. We can and unfortunately do hurt and alienate one another. Because we often share community spaces, we are terribly vulnerable to one another's insensitivity and ignorance. But some of us are also politically threatening, structurally oppressive, and historically and presently murderous in our endeavors. I contend that those most targeted for destruction are people of color--trans and not trans, and females--cis, trans, and intersex. In my lived experience, and based on everything I have learned about the history of humanity, those most politically threatening, structurally oppressive, and historically murderous are white and male.

I'll never have enough time to critique the barbaric and savage practices of WHM--they are endless and on-going with no sign of slowing down. But this blog will likely continue to focus most often on what WHM do that oppresses everyone else or, at least, to place oppressed people's many struggles in the context of seeing how WHM supremacist society shapes how and what we do to survive, and also, hopefully, sooner than later, achieve liberation by placing at the center of our analysis the experiences of girls and women globally, particularly those of color, those who are poor, and those who live in the Third and Fourth Worlds.

Please also see these related posts:
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/jumping-into-deep-end-of-gay-jean-pool.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2008/08/prison-and-closet-racism-and.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/radical-african-feminist-patricia.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/08/uses-of-erotic-erotic-as-power-classic.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/08/black-gay-men-and-white-het-male.html 
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-does-pro-sex-mean-and-what-can-one.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-is-gay-sex-pornography-tries-to.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/09/gay-literature-gay-pornography-gay-sex.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/trying-not-to-hit-below-belt-tricky.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/transsexuals-transgender-and-radical.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/anti-radical-anti-feminist-alliance.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/anti-radical-anti-feminism-in-pro.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-without-blue-since-when-did-lgbt.html

The rest of this post was revised on 2 Jan 2010 ECD. With great thanks to ll for all her support and critiques. Further revisions occurred on 15 January 2013.

We understand that Life is imperiled by the ways of the White Het Man, and as his ways are increasingly globalised, made foundational, made to seem functional, made to seem sane, made to seem necessary, made to seem good, moral, natural, and--especially--indispensable and inevitable. We recognise that these ways of being in the world and doing civilisation are structural and political while also cultural, social, and personal.

In societies dominated and ruled by the White Het Man, gender is not what it is in other societies which pre-exist and survive his savage and brutal invasions and occupations of us and our land.

In the societies of the WHM, we endure, resist, challenge, and seek to radically transform gender through the eradication of the institutions and interpersonal practices which bolster and protect it as a cornerstone in WHM society, along with race, region, and class hierarchies.

We ought not seek assimilation into WHM society as our goal, while we understand that some of us will sometimes acquiesce and accommodate for individual survival; also because the dominant society only gives us queer-hating, trans-hating, and woman-hating options for how to survive. But accommodation and acquiescence, assimilation and acceptance, and the defence and enabling of WHM values, systems, and institutions ought not be our collective aim. Radical transformation of WHM society is a process and goal worthy of our time and energy, wherever and whenever we have it to give.

We don't seek transgression of gender as performance; we work for the eradication of gender as power exercised over and against all who are not WHM. The kind of drag show performances white gay men enthusiastically promote as acceptable, which overtly mock and degrade non-trans girls and women as a specific class of gender-oppressed human beings, ought to be challenged not applauded. (These shows are also notoriously racist, classist, pro-prostitution, and pro-child molestation.)

Gender, for WHM, is a structural, political system of subordination, dominated by men, of all beings deemed "female" or "feminine", particularly and especially everyone named "girls" and "women" by men. In the West, the gender system is ruled by WHM, oppressing and stigmatising of all us who are not deemed white enough, heterosexual enough, or manly enough. For our collective survival, we ought not seek to become who they want us to be even while we find ourselves caught in ways of being they want us to learn, practice, and support. The path is never easy. We don't pretend it is.

For survival, we're better off creating safe and loving environments, systems of support-in-community in which to raise our youth; we required dignified care-in-community for our elderly. We don't pretend our ancestors don't exist or don't have spiritual relevance to our current lives. We respect and honor Earth-centered spiritual traditions but do not seek to exploit them, as so many middle-class whites do. We are, many of us, Indigenous. Those of us who are Indigenous have not disappeared. The many forms of exploitation and invisibilisation of our people by non-Native queer and trans people, and by non-Native heterosexuals, is not just problematically racist; it is pro-genocidal.

We seek to undermine and overthrow WHM supremacist systems and practices, and the authority and abuses which inhere in them, to take what is ours, including our land and Ways, and to bring justice and liberation to our people. We do this for the Earth and for all Life, with the assistance of the Earth and all Life. We join with the forests and seas to restore the Earth to a vibrant heavenly place of increasing diversity, not a death-adoring hellish purgatory adorned with pavement and pollution.

We recognise that dominant Religious, Economic, Educational, Medical, Psychiatric, Immigration, and Criminal-Justice practices and policies are historically and presently used against our people, to punish and quarantine us, to silence us and remove us from the population where the people in power live, to take reproductive choice from us, to take capability of feeling sexual pleasure from us, to produce in us a sense of shame and self-hatred, to render us invisible to the powerful and disdainful towards one another.

We understand that among English-speakers and readers, the term "surgery", for many of us without raced, ethnic, economic, educational, gendered, and regionalised power, is not positive; nor is it a desired medical intervention. The very mention of it triggers many of us. It has been used against our bodies in violating and disabling ways. Those who vocally promote surgery as unproblematically "positive" in dominant media are among the most privileged and powerful queer and non-queer people: they do not speak for all of us, while they are part of our community. We ask that those who are most privileged and powerful inside and outside queer community, be responsible to the ways that surgical interventions are used to terrorise and traumatise many of us who are trans, intergender, intersex, or not. We also demand it. This is not to say that non-dominant people do not find reduced levels of emotional and cognitive dissonance with the assistance of the dominant medical establishment; it is to say that this happens in contexts in which traditional Indigenist approaches have been systematically degraded and eliminated from our lives.

We do not consider the promotion of "shopping" for a vagina or breasts to be respectful of those of us who were labeled female at birth, raised as girls, and who are structurally located and socially mistreated as women. Some of us many choose to have surgical procedures that include modifying our genitals. We acknowledge that many who do seek out medical or surgical interventions to alleviate anxieties about gender identity are not transgender or transsexual; many cisgender men and women seek out these surgeries, for example. But the net result is one that promotes and protects, rather than undermines, WHM supremacist power.

There is no indication that liberal Western WHM supremacist societies cannot accommodate M2F and F2M people, as long as they accept the heteropatriarchal standards and practices enforced on everyone, trans or not. And as long as our people, particularly women and transsexual people of any gender, remain subordinate and subservient to those in power, especially sexually in systems of exploitation and rape.

Because most of us who are transgender and transsexual will never be able to afford or otherwise access such surgeries or medical interventions, we must respect the fact that most of us not only do not "pass" as "women" and "men", but many of us do not wish to, even while this decision does not keep us safe from threats and acts of violence and discrimination by non-trans people.

White M2F and F2M transsexual people are a minority population among all trans people; this is not something the dominant media will alert the masses to, because it would mean acknowledging that many of us do not accept or find any kind of emotional-psychic restorative home living inside the confines of a Western white patriarchal gender binary. Those of us who are intergender and transgender, for example, as well as many of us who are transsexual and intersex, are not interested in gender-specific surgeries to change our sexed bodies. Because of this decision to refuse surgical interventions, or simply to not choose them, we are never made visible on talk and chat shows. The general attitude among white liberal non-trans people is this: "I sure hope they can get that top and bottom surgery, so they can fully be a man or a woman". This is not only misogynistic and male supremacist; it is anti-lesbian, anti-intergender, and anti-transgender too. And it is racist and classist, promoting ways of being that are outside of traditional Indigenist and oppressed ethnic worldviews and values.

We understand that the problem with mass corporate media isn't simply that it represents us in stereotypical pro-gender binaried (heteropatriarchal and white male supremacist) ways, but that it doesn't represent or present most of us at all. We also understand that whether we are Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, or poor, homeless, trafficked, enslaved, or imprisoned, our experiences are not part of what the dominant society (and its media) imagines "who queer people are".

Access into racist, heterosexist, capitalist, and misogynistic institutions such as marriage and the military ought not be not our aim: why do some of us fight for the right to commit racist atrocities against citizens of the world who are targeted solely because they are Brown, Black, Latina/o, Asian, African, Indigenous and not white and North American, European, and Australian? Why do some of us fight for inclusion in an institution--marriage--that remains dangerous for most cis women, including especially economically disadvantaged women, immigrant women, and women who come from cultures that have other ways of creating intimate unions, families, and communities? Why would we support, in our conscientious activism, the systems and institutions that oppress and kill us, globally. We would we support, in our communities of choice, the ways of WHM that destroy people of color, the poor, women, and the Earth and its many expressions of Life?

While we acknowledge that we each must find our own ways through this life, we aim to honor and respect those without the power of those atop gender, race, class, and region hierarchies. We can demonstrate this respect by not appropriating the names and labels race- and gender-oppressed people cannot escape. We can choose to not call ourselves the names that cisgender girls and women have no choice but to negotiate and endure. We can affirm ourselves as transgender, transsexual, intergender, intersex, asexual, genderqueer and otherwise queer people, along with many names and identities that aren't white-centric, euro-centric, and Anglo-centric. We ought not be required by anyone to use only English terms, Western terms, and non-Indigenous terms to name ourselves.

We can, as gay males, reject the politics of affirming manhood in media and in society-at-large; we can affirm a politic that states and expresses unequivocally that there is nothing wrong with being unmasculine and unmanly; and, in fact, our collective survival depends on het men stopping their masculinist and manly ways. If gay males are ever to be respectful, trusted allies to girls and women's struggles for liberation globally, we must embrace a politic that doesn't promote oppressive manhood.

We must not forget that lesbians and queer women of any color, female or intersex, are oppressed not only for being lesbian and queer; they are oppressed for being female, girls, and women. And most non-heterosexual women are also oppressed by class, race, and region.

Let us reject as inhumane and destructive to our collective humanity the sexual values and practices of WHM supremacist societies. Let us work together to stop erotically or economically valuing domination, subordination, humiliation, and degradation: those values and practices are unbecoming, repressive, oppressive, and hostile to collectivist liberation.

For too long those with race, ethnic, class, region, and gender privileges and power who are queer have dominated and defined our agendas, our approaches to activism, and our erotic and intimate lives. We must keep at the center of our struggles, those of us with the least access to the most power, especially those who are poor, of color, Third and Fourth World, and female. We must do so with accountability to and in alliance with anti-capitalism/militarism/imperialism/colonialism queer activists; with womanist activists; with radical feminist activists--white, of color, lesbian, and queer; and with Indigenous women activists globally.

image is from here

Why do we write Queer Theory? For whose liberation? Investigating Below The Belt for answers

image of book cover is from here

Ironically, I've been listening to some Barbra Streisand music lately. Contrary to stereotype, this isn't a normal pastime for me. In keeping with stereotype, I believe Barbra Streisand has one of the most FABULOUS contemporary voices in popular white music.

The discussion below takes on queer theory and the matter of genocide, among other things. It also discusses the work of Andrea Dworkin. So what with all the issues related to Jewish survival historically, I thought the above image suited this post. But "the genocide" discussed below by me is not that of the Jews in Nazi Germany. It is the current one, against Indigenous Peoples globally. That Theory-Q fails to identify this current genocide as a genocide deeply concerns and alarms me, and also points out, I think, what is so unhelpful about so much Queer Theory, and most other non-queer theory too: its writers refuse to engage with reality, instead discussing reality as if it were only some idea, imagined perhaps, or made real only through an inflection of language, not through the infliction pain and power.

This just in from Below the Belt: a post in response to some challenges I brought, hopefully respectfully, to Theory-Q. This response appears in its entirety below, and you may click on the title to link back to its appearance at the source blog.

Below Theory-Q's post are my responses, interspersed between passages of what you're about to read not so obnoxiously interrupted by moi.

Fair warning: If I press "post" and this goes public, and the formatting is off, I may not correct it. This was annoying to try to configure as a post--waaaay longer and more tedious than most recent posts I've done, and I'm not really up for going over all of it again, paragraph by paragraph, to make sure spacing and such is all as it should be for easiest legibility. Please forgive me my lapse in attention to such details. 

12.28.2010

What Do You Wish To Do - About Rape, Genocide, and Poverty - on Below the Belt?

This post comes out of a lively debate about the differences between radical activism and academia that I have been having with fellow-blogger Julian Real. The discussion started after I posted some comments on Andrea Dworkin's book, Pornography, which you can read here. To see Julian's response to my original post, please click here. And also click here, to read my answer to Julian, as well as his reply. The post below starts by attempting to answer the following question that Julian posed: What do you wish to do about rape, genocide, and poverty on Below the Belt?

Below the Belt can do a limited number of things about rape, genocide and poverty. Only about 30% of the world's population currently has access to the Internet and an even smaller percentage of Internet users speak English. Therefore, on a global scale, Below the Belt cannot directly affect the lives of the poorest people and the most oppressed - those who have to struggle on a daily basis for survival, for food, water, shelter, and freedom from bodily harm. Its immediate impact is limited to those who have access to the Internet and to those who are fluent in English. This is, on a world scale, a relatively wealthy minority. And I think all bloggers should be conscious of this - whatever they publish online is only directly accessible to a small number of people, usually those who are rich enough to have the Internet, a global "elite" of sorts. This is not to say that groups and individuals within this "elite" are not subject to systematic rape, poverty, or the risk of being killed, but that they are (relatively speaking) in a privileged position vis-a-vis the majority of humans around the world.

Does this mean that Below the Belt and other blogs can do absolutely nothing about the worst forms of oppression? I do not think so. We can influence the way that those who are relatively privileged think and act towards the most oppressed and towards issues of oppression. I cannot speak for everyone on Below the Belt (we have a variety of writers - all with different goals), but in my writing, I want to do two things: (1) to examine and critique ideas that form the foundation for oppressive practices, with the aim of getting people to think about how they think about the world; and (2) to provide an introduction to some issues in gender studies, feminism, queer theory, history, and philosophy - a sort of 'Gender Studies 101'.

You might say that this an anti-radical, anti-activist, anti-anti-oppression agenda, but I don't agree. Let's take the issue of genocide. What needs to happen in order for a genocide to occur? There needs to be an elite willing to slaughter an entire group of people, a specialized 'armed group' to carry out the majority of the killings (I'm thinking of the Einsatzgruppen during the holocaust or the Interahamwe in Rwanda), a majority of the non-target population brainwashed into staying silent or participating in the slaughter (with dissenters murdered or tortured), a sufficient military buildup, development of ways of identifying the people to be killed (I.D. cards, badges, and other symbols), an animalization/de-humanization of the target group (in Rwanda, Tutsis were referred to as Inyenzi or cockroaches), assurance that no other state or international organization will intervene to stop the bloodshed etc...

In addition to all of this, and perhaps prior to it, something has to happen at the ideational level. Both the elites organizing the slaughter and the masses co-opted into it need to be able to believe that a certain ethnic/religious/national/gender category is capable of doing things as a group - that the individuals within it are all virtually the same, with the same biological characteristics (usually biologically inferior, but sometimes also with some laudable aspects, e.g. - Hitler occasionally showed admiration for ‘the cunning' of the Jews), and that they have all signed a social contract with each other to support certain nefarious activities against "the state" or against some other entity: "the Jews" or "the Tutsis" or "the Women" or "the Indians" all have the same aims and the same goals, they are all "in league" with each other. Genocide and ethnic cleansing depend to an extent on our capacity to think about large groups in a particular way, to reduce individuals to their collective identities, to believe that ethnic/gender/national etc.. groups can actually behave in unison, all with the same purposes and with the same goals.

What I aim to do on Below the Belt is to criticize conceptions such as these and thereby challenge the ways of thinking that form the foundation for oppressive practices. I want to get people to think about how they think about the world, how they think about others, how they think about other(ed) categories of gender, nationality, race, sex, and ethnicity. This isn't as important as providing material resources (food, shelter, or arms) to people who are at risk of genocide, undermining the flow of such material to the genocidaires, exposing the existence of genocide, mobilizing international public opinion against the actions of the oppressors, or getting international organizations to develop mechanisms for stopping mass slaughter. But it is still a worthwhile endeavor. Genocide will be harder to undertake, harder to justify, and it will be harder to co-opt people into genocide, if ideas about the ontological validity of fundamental national/gender/ethnic/religious characteristics are discredited.

Andrea Dworkin herself recognized that the ways we conceive of the world (the ideas we have about other subjects and objects) are crucial enablers of genocide. In the essay you recommended for me, "Biological Superiority: the World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea," Dworkin rejects matriarchal arguments about the biological superiority of women to men because she recognizes that such a theorization of an entire gendered category could lay the groundwork for genocide against it - this has already happened to women all over the world, would it really be a good thing if something similar could happen to men? I completely agree with Dworkin in this case, but I would extend her argument: it is not just ideas about the biological superiority or inferiority of particular national/ethnic/gendered groups, but sweeping generalizations about the supposed immutable “character” (whether cultural, biological, or political) of these categories that can form the basis for genocide or ethnic cleansing. In practice, the cultural and political generalizations are never really that distinct from the biological generalizations – but ultimately, they can have similar effects.

I realize that there are some serious problems with this argument, because people do do things in groups. I am just now doing some research about Iceland and I’m looking into how, in the 19th Century, wealthy landowning farmers developed a social system which guaranteed them a steady supply of cheap labor. In order to get permission to marry and own land, ordinary people had to earn a certain amount of money, and basically, the only way they could earn it in such an isolated and rural country was to become paid servants to landowning farmers. The farmers collectively kept wages low, which meant that poor Icelanders would have to work for them from at least their mid-teens until their thirties, thus providing a steady supply of cheap labor and keeping their profits high. Clearly, “the landowning farmers” created a social system that functioned to support their material interests. People can and do act collectively – but can they really do so in extremely large groups, such as nations and genders? And what are the consequences of imbuing such big collectives with sweeping generalizations? Does it set the stage for ethnic cleansing or genocide? At what point do broad statements about "group characteristics" become dangerous? I don’t really know how to solve this problem (aside from marshalling the rather primitive distinction between "small" and "big" groups or drawing on the difference between "organized interests" and "identity categories"), and I would appreciate any insights you or other readers may have, as well as any guidance about writers who have tried to wrestle with this issue.

Nevertheless, I do want to note that I have not acquired these ideas about genocide, generalizations, and collective identity through academia, but mainly through the personal experience of living in a context in which genocide and ethnic cleansing were quite close to home. I am, unfortunately, very familiar with the kinds of mindsets and theorizing that it takes to justify mass slaughter of a different nationality. Contrary to your assumptions, I am not from the United States, although I did go to university there. I bring this up because you seem to think that I am invested in the U.S. liberal academic project with my heart and soul, and that all my ideas emanate from it. I realize that my recent writing does give a very academic impression, given how full it is of citations, academic protocol, technical language, and academic authors. But it was never my intention to be a parrot of U.S. academia, and I am sorry to have made myself seem like that.

About the U.S. academic project, I do agree with you that it is, in general, about maintaining the status quo. In many cases, it also directly links into supporting U.S. global hegemony, the spread of capitalism, developing technology for the U.S. military, and a whole host of other atrocities. Nevertheless, I would argue that while academic institutions are thoroughly involved in upholding things as they are, individuals within academia are able to use the resources of their position for liberatory and subversive ends. Being an academic means being bestowed with astounding privilege – with the time to gather information, to read, to think, to write, and to speak on a variety of subjects. It is rarely the intention of the institutions, or the people and organizations that fund them, to allow this level of freedom. And while they often succeed in curtailing it, some individual academics have been able to use the time and money that they have been given as a platform from which to inform people and move them to action.

For example, Judith Butler has spoken and written eloquently about recent conflicts in the Middle East and she has also recently refused a prize at the Berlin Gay Pride Parade, after speaking with Muslim queer activists and hearing their stories of oppression within the German mainstream LGBTQ movement – thus bringing attention to the problem of Islamophobia in queer communities. Many of the people you cite on your blog are academics – bell hooks, Catherine MacKinnon, Patricia Hill Collins – which gives me some hope that there will continue to be space in academia for radical, liberatory voices. Although, as you point out, the situation is getting more difficult, with cuts to public education funding limiting academic posts, with increasing corporate sponsorship of academia, and with the internet providing more opportunities for surveillance and censorship of people’s voices - it seems that the potential for inspirational and transformative education within academia is unfortunately diminishing by the day.

And it has also diminished in the broader society, with the mainstream media cutting off radical activists’ access to the public – in this case, I also very much agree with you. But I don’t think at all that radical activists are bad at expressing themselves, or that the increasing poverty of political discourse is in any way their fault – did I say anything to suggest otherwise? And if I point out that radical critiques of society should indicate pathways for getting out of hell, how is this "seeing what activists do and don’t do as the problem"? Or blaming the victim? I am really not saying that the reason oppression still exists is because of things activists have or have not done. There are many reasons for this – very few of which have to do with the people working practically for change. The reason I like to encourage radicals to develop theories that leave open possibilities for change and to develop solutions for the problems they describe is because not doing so could lead to a resigned pessimism of the following type: "the powers that be are the powers that be, they are evil and all-powerful… but there is little that you and I can do about it, things will most likely stay the same." Noam Chomsky’s writing about U.S. hegemony does this, to an extent. I would argue that Dworkin’s Pornography also risks inspiring such an attitude. But what I am definitely not saying is that it is the fault of people like Noam Chomsky and Andrea Dworkin that things are the way the are.

As you probably gathered from my discussion above, I don’t subscribe to a sharp distinction between "thinking" and "acting." Thinking, reading, and speaking are, in a literal sense, actions. And in order to inspire people to act, you first have to get them to think. The Andrea Dworkin books that I have read are all about showing people a different way of perceiving the world and thinking about it than what is presented to them in the mainstream. It is about exposing the systematized violence and harm that societal discourses generally keep out of view. This inspires people to act – but before they act, they have to think. Otherwise, they would be automatons, robots, flinching instinctively at every juncture. Perhaps this should be the natural response to violence and oppression, perhaps it should not be necessary to think about it, perhaps it should just instinctively feel wrong and inspire a reflex action (akin to burning oneself on a stove). But unfortunately, this does not happen often enough, and in order to realize the reality of racism, patriarchy, genocide, and rape, people have to "un-think" years of socialization. Getting people to think more, to think about how they think, and to think differently is part-and-parcel of inspiring them to act – the two projects cannot be separated.

A similar logic can also be used to deal with this very important question, that you posed:

"I'll bet you that there are far more books on 'how to critique the idea of gender' in Academia right now than there are on "how to end male supremacy". Why? I'd be interested to know why you think that is the case, and what the function of such anti-activist 'gender discourse' is, politically/socially?"

I do agree that, right now, books and articles on "critiquing the idea of gender" are much more prominent in academia than work on ‘how to end male supremacy’. There are a variety of reasons for this. Firstly, I think that a number of feminist theorists have adopted the view that male supremacy and female subordination may be embedded in the way we conceive of gender itself. The way that the binary gender system sets up males and females as inevitable "polar opposites" and embeds oppressive distinctions between the sexes such as strong/weak, big/small, powerful/powerless, basically assures a priori that females will be oppressed. Since females are portrayed – by definition – as the opposite of males, the discourse will ensure that they remain "the second sex." I have dealt with this issue in some of my previous posts (see "Gender As Discourse," and "Strong Man, Weak Woman"). I don’t think that activists and academics who have moved towards critiquing the idea of gender do not care about ending the subordination of women – they are looking for the root causes of it. Undermining modern discourses about gender, and encouraging the creation of a gendered world that transcends the current binary is, in my view, not a separate project from combating male domination.

Secondly, the popularity of "critiquing the idea of gender" also has to do with increased concern for ending violence against people who do not identify within the binary gender system and those who do not meet expectations of masculinity and femininity. Transgender people and others who fall outside the current gender structure cannot even claim an existence for themselves under the current rules, and feminine men and masculine women live in constant terror of the threat of violence. However, it is important to note that the violence is aimed disproportionately at feminine men, transfeminine people and at femininity in general, which suggests that homophobia and sissyphobia are basically misogyny, enacted on male-bodied people. This is not to say that masculine women and transmasculine people do not face their own struggle against violence, but that the attacks on femininity are often much more intense, savage, and systematic. Some feminists, by focusing on the category of "woman" as the sole subject of feminism, ended up not paying enough attention to those who do not identify as either men or women or who are identified by others as somehow not in line with these categories.

Nevertheless – I do see how post-structuralist critiques of the idea of gender can be almost completely irrelevant in the context of, for example, a rape crisis center, female genital mutilation, or the fostering of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia. For the raped and battered woman, gender is unfortunately all too real and dithering on about its social construction may not be helpful (although, admittedly, understanding gender as a product of oppressive social forces, rather than natural instincts, may help to deal with the trauma). Ultimately, while the “here-and-now” work of ending gendered violence – and violence in general – may draw on some academic ideas, it is not at all dependent on them. And the dominance of the "critiquing the idea of gender" view in academia has served to divert attention away from practical efforts to combat the continuing structural violence against women and feminine persons, from the struggles for liberation waged by feminists around the world, and from the connections between movements for environmental sustainability, racial justice, and women’s survival. Academia has betrayed activism – there is no doubt about this. Academics are, as such, unwittingly complicit with those who wish to continue the violence, the oppression, the hatred, and the murder.

But this does not mean that we should completely discard intellectual responses to oppression! As I outlined in my discussion of genocide above, there is a place for both the practical work of ensuring that mass slaughter does not happen (providing resources to populations likely to be affected, giving out humanitarian aid, developing international institutional mechanisms to prevent genocide) and the intellectual work of critiquing the ideas and world-views that make large-scale killing conceivable and possible in the first place. Ideally, the two should not be separated and they should work in tandem, although I do see how, in a condition of primary emergency, the “here-and-now” work of ensuring the killing is prevented and helping the (potential) victims is more important. I believe that, in academia and in the broader society, there should be a place for practical activist work on ending oppression and for the more theoretical endeavor of thinking about the ideas and conditions that make structural violence possible. It is unacceptable that the former is currently marginalized and this situation needs to be changed.

On the subject of post-structuralism, I don’t think that ideas about the normative foundations for (and functions of) empirical claims are entirely useless for activists. The way that I was laying out my position on this issue was far too depoliticized, and I see how you could have perceived my point of view as fundamentally impractical and nihilistic. When I said that different empirical claims about how the world "is" are tied to normative ideas about how the world "should be," I should have added that empirical world-views are index-linked to specific power-political interests, often buttressing oppressive social structures. Thus, supposedly "empirical" claims about women’s physical and intellectual capacities have served to ensure that women remain physically weaker than men and that they are excluded from academic, scientific and political positions. Activists could therefore use post-structuralist ideas about the connection between ideas about how the world "is" and nefarious political goals in order to undermine the worldviews that form some of the foundations of structural inequality. I certainly don’t think that oppression originates in the improper "exchange" of ideas, nor do I believe that ideas are "freely exchanged." Rather, I would argue that one of the primary ways that structural inequalities of power are maintained is through the propagation of ideas about reality that have the function of upholding them, that make them seem invisible, and that make them appear natural.

In my work, I aim to evaluate claims about "reality" not only on the extent to which are truthful but also on the basis of whose interests and which normative goals they will uphold. I therefore support any depictions of reality which uphold the interests of women, queer folks, indigenous peoples, and non-whites. This does not mean that I view things like whether patriarchy exists or whether American Indians are under assault as "debatable" – and this is a charge that is often thrown at people engaging in post-structuralist analysis: "you doubt whether the sky is really blue and you might even believe that pigs can fly." This is not at all the case, and I think it is a profound misreading of post-structural theory (caused in some cases by the obscurity of the kind of writing this theory inspires). But while there is no need to debate the existence of patriarchy or the oppression of non-whites, there are questions about these phenomena that are definitely worth much consideration, the answers to which will directly impact how they are dealt with: what causes patriarchy? Through which mechanisms does it work? Does it exist in all societies, and if not, under what conditions has it not existed? Why is it currently in place? What are the causes of racism? Why does it exist and how does it work? Getting to the vital issue – "what is to be done?" – first requires thinking about and responding to some of the questions such as the ones I enumerated above.

I am also by no means requesting that Andrea Dworkin and others put forward their positions solely in “this-is-how-I-see-it” terms. I do not see worldviews and theories as being a "personal" thing, with each individual having their own unique way of seeing things. This would be to deny the social nature of knowledge and to make all claims about the world contingent purely on individual experience. Rather, what I noticed in Dworkin’s approach is a long-standing tradition in Western (especially liberal and capitalist) thought of conceptualizing individuals as rational actors, seeking to minimize costs and maximize benefits. I also noticed that, in line with social contract theory, Dworkin imbued very large collectives with the capacity to form informal pacts, think rationally, and operate for their own survival. I am sorry if I gave this impression – but I was not critiquing the views laid out in Pornography because they were Dworkin’s personal views, or because they were the views of a white woman, but rather because those views were based on certain ontological assumptions about human nature and society which have a long and distinguished history in Western philosophy and with which I have disagreements – this is as much a critique of Dworkin as it is a critique of, for example, Adam Smith or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls. I was also not criticizing Dworkin’s views so that I, as a "white man" (for the record, I don’t identify as a "man"), can claim objectivity and ownership of the way the world really "is." My post was written in the style of a philosophy-student-cum-wannabe-academic: you might think that this is an oppressive identity to take on, or that this is the identity that "white men" who want to author reality adopt. There is truth to this, but as I described above, there is also a positive side to academic intellectual thought and this is what I want to be a part of on Below the Belt. 

*          *          *

This is my response to what appears above:

Hi Theory Q,

First, my apologies for referring to you as a man if you don't identify as one. I welcome you informing me of how you experience yourself, as well as what you know of how you are experienced by the women in your life. I'll note that while I am male and intergender, I am structurally located as man relative to women I know and to any woman I don't know who I may be following on a street at night. I make it a point not to walk behind any women at night, because I know my being is "a man" in social spaces where I am not known intimately--and sometimes even where I am. But structurally, regardless of what my internal experience of myself is, I am made into a man. But I reject it as an emotionally-spiritually-mentally-politically inaccurate term for myself, and wish to respect you doing so also, for whatever reasons you do so. This is, perhaps, a discussion for another post altogether! Also, how do you identify your sexual orientation, if at all?

I find myself feeling frustrated, lonely, and sad as I read over your post, while I also feel glad that you've written it. I'm glad you're expressing yourself, finding your truths, creating meaning in your life. This too, I want to respect and also support. Please let me know if anything that follows is experienced by you, in your body-mind, as disrespectful or hurtful.

I agree with you that "Below the Belt can do a limited number of things about rape, genocide and poverty" in part because "[o]nly about 30% of the world's population currently has access to the Internet and an even smaller percentage of Internet users speak English." But I don't mean to imply that the way a queer collective blog like Below The Belt can impact political reality is by reaching non-English speaking people more effectively with better/clearer/more effective ideas. I also don't believe that U.S. Spanish-, or Traditional Native-language speaking people and people living outside the U.S. who don't speak English, need to be reached by us and our ideas. I don't believe that people who are activists in the Third and Fourth Worlds need to find out about reality from us. I think exactly the opposite: we need to be listening to them, and finding ways to do so. We also need to stop thinking quite so much, and feel what is going on. I disagree with your premise that by thinking more, we act more anti-oppressively. I believe that by feeling more we are motivated to work towards social change.

Reading about rape didn't get me to understand that rape is wrong. Witnessing the impact of it did. Experiencing sexual assault did. The non-Southern whites who began to support Civil Rights in the U.S. for African Americans weren't convinced of this by reading good ideas about race and racism, primarily. Their actions were shaped by watching white policing officers on television knocking down Black women and men and children with the aggressive, hostile, and utterly humiliating blasts of water from fire hoses. The viewing and the act are not, strictly speaking, ideas. Experience isn't always or even primarily mediated through the intellect, as such a term is used in the U.S.

The idea that people act responsibly with privileges they have based on what they think, I'd argue, is not accurate/truthful. It has been shown that people don't vote for leaders they believe in because of stated ideas, but rather due to how and what they feel about a given candidate, including on subconscious levels. People vote for someone because they rather intangibly, "like her" (or him).

I believe we are motivated towards social justice, towards wanting liberation for ourselves and other people, because of how being oppressed feels and what it does: it hurts, it is humiliating, it is lethal. The absence of political liberation from social hierarchies fosters gross violence--primarily in two forms: violence by the oppressors against the oppressed, both institutionally and interpersonally, and other systematic injuries and injustices to whole classes of people, such as terroristic rape and the indignities and horrors of racism. I believe that we are motivated to act based on something deep within us that is beyond, if inclusive of, the so-called "rational" mind. I believe it is what our bodies and minds, hearts and souls, experience that shape us and propel us into action out of callousness, indifference, apathy, inertia, sorrow, despair, and exhaustion.

I learned a lot about hetero/sexism and racism by the age of nine. Not from being intellectually gifted, either. I was more into watching TV sitcoms and family-themed dramas than reading anything at all. My brother had the "honor" of being the brilliant one in the family--and he received honors throughout grade school for his intellectual prowess (as Kantian white male supremacist school systems regard such expressions of abstracted selfhood). There were ways my brother's intellect could amaze me; and there were ways it was used to hurt me, also.

I learned from him that "intellect" alone was not a wise guide; like a Tin Man, it wasn't made with a heart. Or was it? The body-mind is a false dualism. Like so much in the white Western heteropatriarchal world, things are not as they are presented by the dominants, even though we are often coercively made into what the dominants want. This is done, in part, by their standards of behavior and systems being compulsory--not learned intellectually, but mimicked, done because to not do them is not allowed, is punished, or is simply not imaginable. What is done, often, is learned but not with compassion or conscience: I learned to misuse my intellect in the service of the maintenance and valuation of society that hated my people and those I loved.

Western Academia didn't nurture or support in me any capacity at all to note when it is and is not appropriate to impose oneself as a white male into and onto the world. I was more empathic than my brother, yes. I also did well enough in school, and I learned that my intellect would be regarded as capable of speaking Truth, while women's truths never got capitalised. I learned that my whiteness made my expressed ideas--as more among the words of white people--"important" in a way that those of people of color would never be, on a class level. I also understood that what was taught to me in school was woefully inadequate, distorted, inaccurate, and often boring; I was told that an Italian discovered "America"; not that genocide happened here, wiping out civilisations, societies, nations, approximately seventy million people--over ten times the number of Jews killed in Nazi Europe. I lived in a society that told me one had to jump through twelve hoops before having an opportunity--if privileged to do so--to jump through four more hoops to get a bachelor of arts degree. When one goes through enough hoops, one can believe there ought to be something valuable about doing so. I can out the other end knowing the Academy couldn't and wouldn't teach me what I most needed to know about myself, my society, and the people and land upon which this society, this civilisation, was so bloodily built.

It is possible that I was unusually empathic due to being an intergender male; this isn't a statement about biology--it's a realisation that those who don't or can't conform to dominant ways of being--assigned and enforced--will be punished and sometimes killed. But I saw, or felt, or intuited, that to be a dominant required doing things that my heart couldn't do: reject as 'the enemy' all women and girls; disassociate with anyone of color. My heart couldn't do that and so I didn't shut myself down, which would have crushed my soul.

I didn't shut down my empathy with people of color due to being white in a white supremacist society. Why? Was it because of ideas about race, racism, and what is wrong or right? I'd say, No. I'd say the truer answer is that it was because I knew what anti-Semitism felt like, and I'd seen images of the outcome of anti-Semitism becoming a ruling force, a collection of atrocious actions, not just a ruling ideology. The ideology is repugnant because of where it can go. That is one of Dworkin's points. I'll speak more to her essay and your comments about it shortly. But it wasn't the offence of the ideology alone that moved me to dis-identify politically with whites. It was feeling what I felt when I found out people had been massacred and relocated, hunted and shot, scalped and chopped up by savage, barbaric white men, who were in the process of building an allegedly great single nation, pretending there were not already more nations here than could be counted. I felt what was done. I knew it through my body, not through my abstracted intellect.

I believe that ideas take hold that match one's emotional knowledge, I believe. Emotional knowledge--the intelligence of the heart, is informed by experience, not ideas, primarily. And experience is informed by how one is placed in various social hierarchies, where one is stationed, what privileges and entitlements one has. This makes knowledge social and political, not only individual. As Foucault noted, any given dominator society has an episteme, a boundary beyond which questions are not allowed to be asked and experience must go unnamed. We use fancy language--you and I--to talk about things that are very simple really. I wrestle with this. The discourse of theory is but one way for the white man to keep us from knowing how we feel--how we, the collective, feel. It is a tool to create disconnection from our hearts and each other, by walling us up in minds that are trained in academic settings to "think only" and to think that only thinking will do something significant, because, we are taught, thinking is how we know we are alive. And thinking is so valuable to white men who, en masse, stop their hearts from bleeding.

You state:

Therefore, on a global scale, Below the Belt cannot directly affect the lives of the poorest people and the most oppressed - those who have to struggle on a daily basis for survival, for food, water, shelter, and freedom from bodily harm. Its immediate impact is limited to those who have access to the Internet and to those who are fluent in English. This is, on a world scale, a relatively wealthy minority [...]

Theory-Q, I believe it is important for privileged people to support oppressed people's actions against tyranny, torture, and torment by letting other privileged people know what suffering and struggle feels like, not primarily by figuring out what ideas back it up. I want us to promote the actions aimed at ending Western Civilisation, white het male supremacy, corporate capitalism. Not by discussing ideas a whole lot. We both know very privileged people will read complicated ideas in English about oppression: including poverty, rape, and genocide. And, again, it won't be the ideas that turn them from a collaborator with an oppressive system into a betrayer of that system and its accomplices. It'll be the inability to rest confortably knowing/feeling what most people must endure for a very few to indulge in acts of thinking-only.
 

You wrote:

Does this mean that Below the Belt and other blogs can do absolutely nothing about the worst forms of oppression? I do not think so. We can influence the way that those who are relatively privileged think and act towards the most oppressed and towards issues of oppression. [...] I want to do two things: (1) to examine and critique ideas that form the foundation for oppressive practices, with the aim of getting people to think about how they think about the world; and (2) to provide an introduction to some issues in gender studies, feminism, queer theory, history, and philosophy - a sort of 'Gender Studies 101'.

You wrote:
You might say that this an anti-radical, anti-activist, anti-anti-oppression agenda, but I don't agree.

What I respond with is this: goals one and two have a place, in my view. But to believe it is ideas that generate social change is to engage in the politics of liberalism. Liberalism places great value on the white male mind, abstracted into discussing ideas outside of the survival struggles any useful ideas flow out of. Who benefits from one thousand discussions about what "cis" means? Not most transsexual or transgender people, who never, ever will use the term "cis" to describe and distinguish people. Because most trans people don't speak English, are poor, are earning little to nothing each day, and are struggling to combat hunger, illness, and the inhumanity of the White Man, now globalised.

You wrote:
Let's take the issue of genocide. What needs to happen in order for a genocide to occur? There needs to be an elite willing to slaughter an entire group of people, a specialized 'armed group' to carry out the majority of the killings (I'm thinking of the Einsatzgruppen during the holocaust or the Interahamwe in Rwanda), [...]

I don't experience genocide that is happening to Indigenous peoples globally to be something that is happening to one group by a distinct and different elite group which is armed militarily. To frame genocide as militarised mass slaughter only or primarily is to not grasp the depth of the problem of genocide, which exists on a variety of levels: spiritual, economic-environmental, social-political, cultural/ethnic, and physical-sexual. Only one part of genocide contains the most grotesquely violent acts, such as those detailed by Mary Crow Dog, aka Mary Brave Bird, *here*: http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2008/10/lakota-woman-on-not-being-white-or-male.html. Why do we, two white males, need to discuss what is happening in Rwanda? How does it benefit white males to do so? Why don't we discuss the genocides you and I are part of, that we support, each day? Wouldn't that be more useful? Wouldn't that call us to listen to our hearts more than discussing what is happening in Rwanda without understanding exactly how whiteness, Christianity, and European men made conditions in many countries across sub-Saharan Africa ripe for rape and murder? Why don't we talk about how we, how our people--white males--rape and murder, through investments if rich, through interpersonal actions if rich or not?

Do you appreciate how even bringing up Rwandan genocide in a discussion between Western whites supports ignorance about the genocides you and I contribute to? A question is this: why do you know more about what happens in Rwanda that what happens in the U.S., re: genocide? It's not that any mass ethnic or group killing anywhere shouldn't matter to us. It's that the episteme of the U.S. requires us not to inquire too deeply about how you and I, and any white men, contribute to the global eradication of Indigenous Peoples, including the people native to Turtle Island.

You wrote:
In addition to all of this, and perhaps prior to it, something has to happen at the ideational level.

This is a privileging of ideas over feelings. And I don't believe ideas come first or deserve to be prioritised in anyone's work if the work is to support the expansion of humanity against the forces of inhumanity.

You wrote:
Both the elites organizing the slaughter and the masses co-opted into it need to be able to believe that a certain ethnic/religious/national/gender category is capable of doing things as a group - that the individuals within it are all virtually the same, with the same biological characteristics (usually biologically inferior, but sometimes also with some laudable aspects, e.g. - Hitler occasionally showed admiration for ‘the cunning' of the Jews), and that they have all signed a social contract with each other to support certain nefarious activities against "the state" or against some other entity: "the Jews" or "the Tutsis" or "the Women" or "the Indians" all have the same aims and the same goals, they are all "in league" with each other. Genocide and ethnic cleansing depend to an extent on our capacity to think about large groups in a particular way, to reduce individuals to their collective identities, to believe that ethnic/gender/national etc.. groups can actually behave in unison, all with the same purposes and with the same goals.

I'd say that for genocide to occur, oppressor-class people need to believe they are part of a group that is capable of acting "as a group" in the groups' interests, which are as likely to be completely insane as "rational". I'd say there's a strong correlation between what the White Man calls "rational" and what non-white women who are politically active call "insane". Just watch this, for more: http://www.handsoffmotherearth.org/2010/07/vandana-shiva-debates-geoengineering-with-gwynne-dyer-on-democracy-now/

And note what being a white man does to one's capacity to even hear what is being said and done there:

http://www.losthighwaytimes.com/2010/07/democracy-now-today-vandana-shiva-is.html

I'd argue that it is because both the white man arguing with Dr. Shiva and the white man blogging about her cannot FEEL what she is talking about, and don't CARE to know what she is talking about, that we are where we are. It is not that they won't engage with her ideas: they'll be happy to do only this as long as it doesn't require them to feel what she has seen and what she knows about what the dominant ways of the Global North costs the people, animals, plants, and the land in the Global South.

I engaged that author in an exchange of ideas. It was mostly a waste of time. Because white men's ideas are not held primarily in the individual mind. They are held collectively, with lots of systemic, institutional supports.

You wrote:
What I aim to do on Below the Belt is to criticize conceptions such as these and thereby challenge the ways of thinking that form the foundation for oppressive practices. [Bold added by Julian for emphasis]

I am already on record for disagreeing that ideas are the foundation for oppressive practices. Children rape and molest each other not because of their ideas but because it is what they feel compelled to act out due to what was done to them. To stop them is not to get at their ideas; to help them stop they must get in touch with their feelings, primarily and be guided humanely to act them out differently. As adults, ideas have a role in what we do. But your privileging of them as the area of action that needs to be interrupted or challenged carries with it an assumption that doing this actually results in people behaving less oppressively, and I believe people do so collectively, not individually, and so changing individual's minds isn't an effective tool for ending oppression.

You wrote:
I want to get people to think about how they think about the world, how they think about others, how they think about other(ed) categories of gender, nationality, race, sex, and ethnicity. This isn't as important as providing material resources (food, shelter, or arms) to people who are at risk of genocide, undermining the flow of such material to the genocidaires, exposing the existence of genocide, mobilizing international public opinion against the actions of the oppressors, or getting international organizations to develop mechanisms for stopping mass slaughter. But it is still a worthwhile endeavor. [Bold added by Julian, for emphasis]

I believe there is probably a good answer to this, but I'm curious to know why you are so sure about this? Is it probable that through a white male supremacist educational system you have been trained to think that thinking about thinking is more important or valuable an endeavor than it actually is, if the project, ultimately, is stopping atrocities and radically transforming inhumane globalised systems into humane local/regional communities?

You wrote:
Genocide will be harder to undertake,
 

You state that as if genocide isn't going on, globally, now, right now, against Indigenous Peoples. Why? How does it serve to support Indigenous people anywhere, including queer and Two-Spirit people, to pretend there is no genocide happening?
 

You wrote:

harder to justify, and it will be harder to co-opt people into genocide, if ideas about the ontological validity of fundamental national/gender/ethnic/religious characteristics are discredited.

Andrea Dworkin herself recognized that the ways we conceive of the world (the ideas we have about other subjects and objects) are crucial enablers of genocide. In the essay you recommended for me, "Biological Superiority: the World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea," Dworkin rejects matriarchal arguments about the biological superiority of women to men because she recognizes that such a theorization of an entire gendered category could lay the groundwork for genocide against it - this has already happened to women all over the world, would it really be a good thing if something similar could happen to men? I completely agree with Dworkin in this case, but I would extend her argument: it is not just ideas about the biological superiority or inferiority of particular national/ethnic/gendered groups, but sweeping generalizations about the supposed immutable “character” (whether cultural, biological, or political) of these categories that can form the basis for genocide or ethnic cleansing. In practice, the cultural and political generalizations are never really that distinct from the biological generalizations – but ultimately, they can have similar effects.

I feel you are misrepresenting, once again, what she is saying about gender and I'm wondering why you continue to collapse her views or conflate them into summaries which aren't accurate. Why do you acknowledge you are unfamiliar with her work, that you do not read her work with great care, and then also summarise what she's stating as if you have read her work carefully? Is that responsible of you to do? I find that to be a white male supremacist action that repeats in your written work. It is consistent with how white males try and control women's speech by putting it through a distorted lens of privilege, ignorance, and sometimes also arrogance. I don't generally experience you as arrogant, Theory-Q. I experience you as thoughtful. As someone who considers what they are putting out into the world. And so it baffles me why you're repeating an action which is effectively disempowering (through misappropriation and misinterpretation) the activist words of a feminist activist calling for an end to male supremacy. Can you see how your actions become male supremacist here?

I witness her speech existing in a specific time and place. And it doesn't exist outside of that time or place. She is quite clear about this. She delivered the speech at a time when it seemed somewhat less impossible that women might actually make some gains, politically, in the late 1970s, before it became clear that Western white patriarchy would not allow that to occur. I hear her noting that it is whites and men who have committed genocidal/gynocidal atrocities. I hear her saying that to believe women are superior to men is to participate in the same kind of thinking that men promote--that to do it is male supremacist/white supremacist, in other words; that it is not feminist; that it is racist. I hear her calling on her audience to consider the implications of what some were promoting in one speech at an event at which many speeches were given, with only one of them promoting this ludicrous idea of female superiority--an idea born of a collective set of experiences: due to women experiencing men behaving with such astounding inhumanity, so systematically, including through acts of incest, battery, rape, and the sexual use and abuse of women on the street.

There's no abstracted "it" with regard to a gendered category: there are women and there are men; there are females and there are males in this white male supremacist system. There's nothing abstract happening. She's not suggesting that women have the power to commit genocide; she's noting that women wanting to do so is an anti-feminist course of action; I believe she knew it wouldn't be realised. She's not arguing against sweeping generalisations: she's noting how and where they occur in real time and real spaces, and what happens when they occur among populations structurally empowered to act out violently against those they deem "other". She's saying that the problem of immutable characterisations is that men who promote themselves having such an intractable character also mistreat women, using biology as an excuse; but the idea can come afterwards: the rapes can happen first; the excuse-making may follow. The speech is an argument against atrocity, and the atrocity she's against is male supremacist, not female supremacist. There was no female supremacist atrocity going on, after all. She's wasn't making the case that women were likely to foster one if they carried forth an idea of female superiority.

From her speech:
To me, this advocacy signifies a basic conformity to the tenets of biological determinism that underpin the male social system. Pulled toward an ideology based on the moral and social significance of a distinct female biology because of its emotional and philosophical familiarity, drawn to the spiritual dignity inherent in a "female principle" (essentially as defined by men), of course unable to abandon by will or impulse a lifelong and centuries-old commitment to childbearing as the female creative act, women have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female biological potential. This attempted transformation may have survival value--that is, the worship of our procreative capacity as power may temporarily stay the male-supremacist hand that cradles the test tube. But the price we pay is that we become carriers of the disease we must cure. It is no accident that in the ancient matriarchies men were castrated, sacrificially slaughtered, and excluded from public forms of power; nor is it an accident that some female supremacists now believe men to be a distinct and inferior species or race. Wherever power is accessible or bodily integrity honored on the basis of biological attribute, systematized cruelty permeates the society and murder and mutilation contaminate it. We will not be different.
 

It is shamefully easy for us to enjoy our own fantasies of biological omnipotence while despising men for enjoying the reality of theirs. And it is dangerous--because genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination. We, who have been devastated by the concrete consequences of this idea, still want to put our faith in it. Nothing offers more proof--sad, irrefutable proof--that we are more like men than either they or we care to believe. [Bold added by Julian, to highlight specific statements]

I realize that there are some serious problems with this argument, because people do do things in groups. [...] People can and do act collectively – but can they really do so in extremely large groups, such as nations and genders?

Do you see how you are abstracting the issues, away from the here and now? How does it serve us to take a current nightmare and turn it into a hypothesis? Whose interests are served by doing this, Theory-Q?

You wrote:

And what are the consequences of imbuing such big collectives with sweeping generalizations? Does it set the stage for ethnic cleansing or genocide? At what point do broad statements about "group characteristics" become dangerous? I don’t really know how to solve this problem (aside from marshalling the rather primitive distinction
 

"Primitive" used by whites in this way, to mean "oversimpified" is implicitly pejorative to Indigenous People, in my view. It maintains a valuation of "progress" as good, and "primitive" as bad or unsophisticated. Primal and Indigenous societies were and some, the ones not invaded and colonised by the White Man, remain the most spiritually-politically-ethically-morally-economically sophisticated and sustainable societies on Earth. There's nothing grand or good about committing genocide and land theft to build a nation with slave labor.
 

You wrote:

between "small" and "big" groups or drawing on the difference between "organized interests" and "identity categories"), and I would appreciate any insights you or other readers may have, as well as any guidance about writers who have tried to wrestle with this issue.

I'd argue that because you miss the salient points of her speech, and of her work generally, you also take those misunderstood ideas as a launching point for further abstraction away from reality. I'm wondering why you do this (if you agree you do). I'll note that I spent a great deal of time in my head. I can do it to this day. It functions to keep me out of my body--that place that holds the deepest truths about my social-political reality. I believe it is common for white males to want to search everywhere but in our own bodies and homes, front and back yards if we have them, in our own neighborhoods and towns, in our own states and countries for the injustices we help breed there, and instead prefer the safety of distance: of studying "them, over there".

You wrote:

Nevertheless, I do want to note that I have not acquired these ideas about genocide, generalizations, and collective identity through academia, but mainly through the personal experience of living in a context in which genocide and ethnic cleansing were quite close to home.

I have no insight, through your own writing, what you are referring to. What are you referring to? And why do we not hear about that? This, really, is the heart of the main point: we avoid that which is most painful to focus instead on things that are far outside of us because it can feel and be safer to do that. I have had to avoid the knowledge of my body for a long time. I resist some information to this day. But I don't believe I will find it by studying some other society or culture. Even if the Academy and its accomplices will publish and approve of me for doing so.

You wrote:
I am, unfortunately, very familiar with the kinds of mindsets and theorizing that it takes to justify mass slaughter of a different nationality.

Where? When?

You wrote:
Contrary to your assumptions, I am not from the United States, although I did go to university there. I bring this up because you seem to think that I am invested in the U.S. liberal academic project with my heart and soul, and that all my ideas emanate from it. I realize that my recent writing does give a very academic impression, given how full it is of citations, academic protocol, technical language, and academic authors. But it was never my intention to be a parrot of U.S. academia, and I am sorry to have made myself seem like that.

I get nothing from your writing that is not consistent with what the U.S. Academy wants of its students, except that you are willing to name some realities that it will only postulate as possibly existent. The Academy, in its non-infinite lack-of-wisdom, deems "patriarchy" to be an idea, as opposed to what women globally endure and die from. How safe it makes men in power for all of us to continue these abstractions of harsh truth. What country or region do you live in, Theory-Q, and why do you not write of the place in which you live, preferring instead to write about Iceland? Do you live in Iceland? If so, I'd understand and more readily support your interest in it.

You wrote:
About the U.S. academic project, I do agree with you that it is, in general, about maintaining the status quo. In many cases, it also directly links into supporting U.S. global hegemony, the spread of capitalism, developing technology for the U.S. military, and a whole host of other atrocities. Nevertheless, I would argue that while academic institutions are thoroughly involved in upholding things as they are, individuals within academia are able to use the resources of their position for liberatory and subversive ends.

To me, Theory-Q, this is like saying that white it is the U.S. military's function to colonise and commit atrocities across various parts of Asia, it is also the case that some soldiers do good things for locals there. Do you see how liberally individualistic your argument is? You are postulating possibilities against the reality of probabilities we can, in fact, know. We can know that however many radicals are borne out of the Academy, it is several million too few. Can we not? This isn't to say that we ought not have radicals in the Academy. I'm glad Ward Churchill taught; I'm glad bell hooks teaches. Catharine MacKinnon is not primarily a professor, although she has taught a lot. She is first and foremost an activist outside the color-blind bounds of the Academy.

So while I value radicals teaching, I don't see you making radical arguments. I see instead how you repeatedly misstate what one radical feminist has stated (Dworkin), and how you abstract painful reality, avoiding dealing directly with it in order to promote the production of more abstract ideas. I am seeing your mind in action, and what it is leading me to understand is that you are not wanting to engage with the guts of the matter--the bloody guts of what's going down. I see you sterilising your hands, putting on Academic gloves, and proceeding to claim that doing this is in service to those who are being harmed as I write this to you. Does my view resonate with you? Or am I ridiculously off-base here?

You wrote:
Being an academic means being bestowed with astounding privilege – with the time to gather information, to read, to think, to write, and to speak on a variety of subjects. It is rarely the intention of the institutions, or the people and organizations that fund them, to allow this level of freedom.

I'm not sure why you'd conclude that. I'd argue that what an institution allows, and encourages, is what it intends to have happen. As long as it knows it has succeeded in producing minds that will abstract reality sufficiently to permit most students to never grasp the horror of what is going down, that the Academy supports. As long as for every one progressive to radical mind it sets out into the world, it has produced millions more who will have to actively support the systems which undermine that one mind's progressive to radical views or other actions. This is not to imply some sort of covert operation. It is to simply observe how something works based on what it does and doesn't do.

A typical liberal response is to say, "That isn't what has to be the case, though." And I remind anyone who responds this way to please join me in addressing reality: the here and the now of the suffering that is going on.

You wrote:
And while they often succeed in curtailing it, some individual academics have been able to use the time and money that they have been given as a platform from which to inform people and move them to action. 



But not so much so that any oppressive institution is terribly worried. And, because those in power tend towards extreme paranoia, you'd better believe the U.S. government is collecting information from Facebook and Academic records on who is studying what. And you'd better believe there is a reason Ward Churchill was fired for things that many professors who were not fired also do. And there are reasons why Andrea Smith has had to fight for tenure. I believe she doesn't have it. So you see, when we return to how things actually are, we don't actually find that individuals can do much, as individuals. Individualism is a core value among the elites, who only ever benefit as a group from the privileges and entitlements they protect with weapons and various forms of corruption.

You wrote:
For example, Judith Butler has spoken and written eloquently about recent conflicts in the Middle East and she has alsorecently refused a prize at the Berlin Gay Pride Parade, after speaking with Muslim queer activists and hearing their stories of oppression within the German mainstream LGBTQ movement – thus bringing attention to the problem of Islamophobia in queer communities. Many of the people you cite on your blog are academics – bell hooks, Catherine MacKinnon, Patricia Hill Collins – which gives me some hope that there will continue to be space in academia for radical, liberatory voices.

I don't come to the same conclusions you do about the effects of the actions of Judith Butler. Judith Butler has accomplished something that is a great disservice to women: she has unnecessarily, but with great Academic approval, abstracted away the realities of male supremacist atrocity, promoting ideas of gender being performed, as if every performance isn't being watched by snipers. I believe Judith has also done some good work, but what you cite is insufficient to make any sort of case that the Academy wants there to be radicals in its midst. She isn't one, after all. Her work is tremendously elitist, academically, theoretically. Who besides Western college students read her? Patricia Hill Collins is a sociologist, not an activist. I find her work enormously helpful. I feel her work stands in solidarity with radical activism in a way that Butler's does not. And bell hooks is a complex person with a complex history with the Academy. She has moved away from radicalism, generally, towards the pursuit of non-radical/anti-activist writings. There is much I respect about her work, however. I just recommended three of her books to someone yesterday, in fact. But the person was seeking information on healing hurts from broken friendships, not on how to effectively organise to create safe spaces for women, or to effectively sue a government to get back stolen land.

Please note the spelling of MacKinnon's first name. There are two a's in it and one e. Those who routinely misquote her spell it "Catherine". That's one way I know she's being misquoted.

Although, as you point out, the situation is getting more difficult, with cuts to public education funding limiting academic posts, with increasing corporate sponsorship of academia, and with the internet providing more opportunities for surveillance and censorship of people’s voices - it seems that the potential for inspirational and transformative education within academia is unfortunately diminishing by the day.

The corporatisation of the Academy, which is intensifying as you say, will mean that no one will be able to advocate radical activism on campus without being penalised. It's already happened--over the last many years the most radical voices have been silenced. So I'm asking you to really accept these conditions we are in, and to note that the Academy cannot any longer serve our interests--if we share the interests of being part of radical social change that makes life less harmful, degrading, and deadly for the oppressed.

You wrote:

And it has also diminished in the broader society, with the mainstream media cutting off radical activists’ access to the public – in this case, I also very much agree with you. But I don’t think at all that radical activists are bad at expressing themselves, or that the increasing poverty of political discourse is in any way their fault – did I say anything to suggest otherwise?

Here's where I picked that up, Theory-Q.

I do think that Andrea Dworkin is putting forth “a perspective.” There is no necessary identical correspondence between what she describes in her book and the reality “out there.” And since my column on this blog is academically-oriented, I see Dworkin’s view of the world as overly rationalistic and as depending on the presumption that extremely large collectives behave in conscious ways. I am not going to assume that everything she says is true because she is a radical feminist, nor am I going to assume that the way she describes reality is the only way to do it or the best way to do it.

[...] I believe that if a writer/activist/theorist attacks an oppressive system, they should also provide a plan for overcoming that system. Plenty of excellent writers and activists do not do this often enough – Noam Chomsky’s books on U.S. hegemony, for example, are full of important critiques, but contain precious little about how U.S. imperialism can be overcome.

I am not saying that Andrea Dworkin is completely delusional and that the small numbers of men who have committed themselves to overcoming patriarchy has not led her to become more pessimistic. The misogynistic society, and misogynistic men, are responsible for her pessimism – there is no doubt about this. That misogyny is prevalent among men (and among some women too) is indisputable. But how one portrays that reality, how one responds to it, and how one views its origins, is very much up for debate.

I guess the thread that runs through our disagreements is about the relationship between empirical and normative claims. You seem to believe that people can unproblematically perceive the world “as it is,” that all Andrea Dworkin is doing is describing a problem, and not making a normative statement about what ought to be done to end oppression. In my work on Below the Belt and elsewhere, I’ve argued that descriptive claims cannot be separated from normative claims in this way. I think that when we are discussing complex phenomena such as genders, nations, and economic systems, it is impossible to describe them exactly as they are. This is because social reality is complicated; descriptive claims can never fully capture it. Indeed, there is a real difference between describing the chair in my room and attempting to describe “all women” or “patriarchy.” And since every description of phenomena such as the latter is necessarily incomplete, this means that different descriptions (prioritizing varying aspects) will proliferate and that each description will have huge implications for how one normatively behaves towards the phenomenon. The solutions that one seeks to end oppression (the normative) will depend hugely on how that oppression is described, which elements of it are prioritized, what its causes are viewed as etc…

Do you see how I concluded that you are proposing that the activists ought to do a better job of articulating their view. Do you see your own tendencies to support abstraction and theorising over dealing in activist ways with the concrete atrocities Andrea Dworkin wrote about unflinchingly?

You also stated:
Evidently, therefore, social constructivism needs to be transformed – but in what way?

This is where it happens: when you go from "society needs to be transformed" to "social constructivism needs to be transformed."

And to this:

"While a fist in a woman’s face, gang rape, or sexual slavery are not ideas as such, it is ideas about women and their place in society which make such acts possible."

It is not an idea that makes a punch possible, Theory-Q. It is the ability of a person to push their fist into someone's face. That's about power, not ideology. And as we know from listening to men who batter, they often don't understand why they are so quick to move to violence, and have often buried their own learned misogyny as such; they have often left unconnected the feelings built up in them by being socialised to be male supremacists, sometimes by watching their fathers bash their mothers, and have pretended there's nothing at all about society or their past that contributes to their current behaviors. If we can accept that a man is a rational being, a moral being, do we then conclude he has the agency to change from being a batterer to not being one? Or are you arguing he has no such agency? Dworkin is saying that men are adult human beings who can regulate their behavior, because they regulate it all the time, every day. They don't punch out their bosses, for example, even while they rage against them. Why? They do go home and beat their wives, when their wives don't oppress them and the bosses do. Why? This is largely due to what has to happen: rage must never be expressed upward in a hierarchy. Violence must be directed downward or horizontally. This is structural truth, not ideology. Flo Kennedy coined the term "horizontal hostility" to describe the social-political phenomenon of people who are oppressed fighting each other instead of joining together to fight their oppressors. She named a phenomenon, not an ideology.

You stated:
I am not talking about causality here – what leads a man to violate a woman in a specific instance can be a variety of things. Rather, these ideas form the condition of possibility for the man to even think about forcing himself on her. Without the ideas to uphold it, such an act would be inconceivable. Ideas serve to circumscribe the realm of the do-able and the acceptable in society, and until the notion that the body of a woman does not solely belong to her is crushed, rape will always be a possibility.

Do you see how strongly you adhere to this theory that ideas generate and are causal to actions? You state this with regard to how oppressors behave and how resisters of oppression behave. I find this a very privileged, elitist view. Because most people I know, including myself, who fight oppression do so because we felt its sting, we have known systematic humiliation, we have been degraded and violated--and none of those things were ideas. They were experiences, felt. Not ideologies, thought. "We feel, therefore we act."

You stated:
So how to reconcile social constructivists’ ideational view of social relations with the reality of material oppression? Simply put, constructivists need to critique materialism as a dominant ideology. Apart from fulfilling one’s basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc…), the seeking of material wealth is an ideological choice – the ever-greater amassing of wealth and power by a privileged few is dependent on the fact that money and positions of power are imbued with such significance in society, that material possessions are valued so much at the ideational level.

Obtaining and keeping control of material wealth is the issue there, I think. Not seeking it. The wealthy already have it. They aren't seeking it. And in the last ten to twenty years it has been intensely consolidated among fewer and fewer people, in terms of the percent who are very wealthy and the percent who are living in poverty or are otherwise struggling economically. The holding onto wealth isn't ideological; it's a function of laws which allow millions to be passed on from one generation to another within a family. It's a function of tax laws, which benefit the rich. It's a function of white male supremacy, which keeps white men atop every social institution in North America. I'm in agreement that men do not conspire, as such, around every corner, to plot and scheme about how to keep white male supremacy alive, as such. But it is the case that whites and men do plan very specific campaigns, do support the candidate who advocate for making the rich richer. They dump hugs sums of money into campaigns, why? Is it not to consolidate power among groups of oppressor-class people? Why else do they do it?

You wrote:
And if I point out that radical critiques of society should indicate pathways for getting out of hell, how is this "seeing what activists do and don’t do as the problem"? Or blaming the victim? I am really not saying that the reason oppression still exists is because of things activists have or have not done. There are many reasons for this – very few of which have to do with the people working practically for change. The reason I like to encourage radicals to develop theories that leave open possibilities for change and to develop solutions for the problems they describe is because not doing so could lead to a resigned pessimism of the following type: "the powers that be are the powers that be, they are evil and all-powerful… but there is little that you and I can do about it, things will most likely stay the same." Noam Chomsky’s writing about U.S. hegemony does this, to an extent. I would argue that Dworkin’s Pornography also risks inspiring such an attitude. But what I am definitely not saying is that it is the fault of people like Noam Chomsky and Andrea Dworkin that things are the way the are.

You say she risks inspiring such an attitude. But I thought you uphold the view that ideas, not attitudes, drive actions. Are you aware of the extent to which her books, especially and including Pornography: Men Possessing Women, has given thousands upon thousands of women the courage to name what they feel; to declare that they have, yes, in fact been harmed in and by pornography, by pornographer and men who consume the material that teaches men how to hate women and achieve orgasm all at the same time. Why would you invisibilise this effect, and only postulate that maybe her book may be guilty of "inspiring such an attitude" that might lead to pessimism. Do you see how being oppressed creates pessimism far more than writing about it does? 

I am reminded of this MacKinnon quote:
'[T]hose who point out that women are being victimized are said to victimize women. Those who resist the reduction of women to sex are said to reduce women to sex. Subordinating women harms no one when pornographers do it, but when feminists see women being subordinated in pornography and say so, they are harming women. Words do nothing except when feminists use them. Go figure.' --Catharine A. MacKinnon,Women's Lives, Men's Laws, page 350.

You wrote:
As you probably gathered from my discussion above, I don’t subscribe to a sharp distinction between "thinking" and "acting." Thinking, reading, and speaking are, in a literal sense, actions. And in order to inspire people to act, you first have to get them to think.

I'm identifying that as an underlying thesis that you repeated bank on. And I'm calling it out as false, incomplete, and white and male supremacist, in that it places a kind of premium on a mode of behaving that is encouraged by the status quo as long as the status quo doesn't develop ideas against the conditions we live in--by supporting actions beyond expressing ideas against the organising, institutionalised, corporately and militarily backed interests of the rich, whites, and men.

Watch here how you go from making a statement against you thesis, to steering it back into your thesis:
The Andrea Dworkin books that I have read are all about showing people a different way of perceiving the world and thinking about it than what is presented to them in the mainstream. It is about exposing the systematized violence and harm that societal discourses generally keep out of view. This inspires people to act – but before they act, they have to think.

No. Before they act they have to feel something. Before they act, they have to experience something. Before we think, we know things that aren't expressed in words. This is generally the case, I believe. Most knowledge, one could argue, is unlanguaged. Most experience is not reproducable as "an idea". Because experience is beyond ideas. You seem to willfully resist seeing ideas as coming after experience. Why is that? What came first in your own life? Experiencing unlanguaged homophobia or naming homophobia and heterosexism?

You wrote:
Otherwise, they would be automatons, robots, flinching instinctively at every juncture.

So people who feel are only robots? Or unconscious animals? Or automatons? Young children are none of the above, are they? Yet they also aren't human beings who digest experience through ideation primarily or only. A problem for many of us who are survivors of child sexual abuse is that we didn't know what happened to us. We couldn't understand it, name it, identify how it made us feel, and so most or all of that gets buried, denied, dissociated from our minds and portioned into our bodies, acted out compulsively against others or ourselves. Are those of us who behave that way automatons, robots, or only flinching instinctively at every juncture?

You wrote:
Perhaps this should be the natural response to violence and oppression, perhaps it should not be necessary to think about it, perhaps it should just instinctively feel wrong and inspire a reflex action (akin to burning oneself on a stove).

Your denial of feeling and complete devaluation and invisibilisation of it as formative and instructive is deeply troubling to me. There are two groups of people who have demonstrated this extreme denial of feeling as important: men and whites who are socialised to devalue it because to acknowledge it means being bullied or otherwise harassed, and those of us who are trauma survivors, who can't go near the feelings trapped in our own bodies.

Given that in the dominant West, ideas are seen as male, and feelings are seen as female, do you get how your repeated valuation of "the significance of ideas" and "the insignificance of feelings" functions to make your discourse white het male supremacist?

But unfortunately, this does not happen often enough, and in order to realize the reality of racism, patriarchy, genocide, and rape, people have to "un-think" years of socialization. Getting people to think more, to think about how they think, and to think differently is part-and-parcel of inspiring them to act – the two projects cannot be separated.

You wrote:
The way that the binary gender system sets up males and females as inevitable "polar opposites" and embeds oppressive distinctions between the sexes such as strong/weak, big/small, powerful/powerless, basically assures a priori that females will be oppressed. Since females are portrayed – by definition – as the opposite of males, the discourse will ensure that they remain "the second sex." 

It's not "the discourse" that does the oppressing, Theory-Q. It's the expression in reality, interpersonally, institutionally, of power--force, action, agency--against the wills and wishes of women. Again, the fist in the face and the gang rape are not ideas. They are traumatically experienced realities, which sometimes the survivors cannot speak of. No one writes more about this than MacKinnon, and nowhere does she advocate for placing ideas above experience, or for disregarding the feelings of women or females for the ideas of men or males. Or, for that matter, she doesn't advocate privileging the analyses and activism of women over the abstract ideas of males.

You wrote:

I have dealt with this issue in some of my previous posts (see "Gender As Discourse," 

The central problem is gender-as-power arranged hierarchically, exercised in social space by males against females, by masculinist males against anyone deemed feminine by those males. Not "gender as discourse." The bullies in schools don't have to wait to have discourse on effeminacy to pick on a femme boy, do they? To focus only on discourse is to be producing work that is privileged and removed from the bodies of the abused. I find this unattended, unowned tendency in your work troubling and problematic.

You wrote:

I don’t think that activists and academics who have moved towards critiquing the idea of gender do not care about ending the subordination of women – they are looking for the root causes of it. 

The root causes of it were unearthed decades ago, Theory-Q. The only theoretical additions that have been produced by whites in the last twenty years obfuscate and abstract that earlier work. With a few exceptions, such as MacKinnon and Jeffreys. What has been produced in the last twenty years is more and more understandings and sharing of experience and analysis from women of color globally, in the West. And that is crucial work. But it isn't needlessly abstracted either. Patricia Hill Collins, Andrea Smith, and bell hooks are examples of how to theorise without becoming an Academic "abstract expressionist".

You wrote:

Undermining modern discourses about gender, and encouraging the creation of a gendered world that transcends the current binary is, in my view, not a separate project from combating male domination.

Undermining a discourse doesn't do much, if that work is needlessly abstract and viewed and discussed by very privileged people who are already well-trained in endlessly discussing theory without doing anything concrete to stop rape, genocide, the prison system, capitalism, and poverty, or to generate radical communities of resistance and support those which exist well beyond the Academy. You appear to attribute a kind of magical ability of old ideas packaged in new and more abstract ways to do something in contexts you acknowledge are more anti-activist than ever. How do you explain this? If the Academy, as you well noted, is more corporate, less funded, and experiencing all manner of cut-backs, how it is also capable of producing new scholarship that is more radical and more activist-oriented than what activists have been writing about for forty years, inside and outside the Academy? (Dworkin never wrote inside an Academic setting, for academics, for example.)

You wrote: 
Secondly, the popularity of "critiquing the idea of gender" also has to do with increased concern for ending violence against people who do not identify within the binary gender system and those who do not meet expectations of masculinity and femininity. Transgender people and others who fall outside the current gender structure cannot even claim an existence for themselves under the current rules, and feminine men and masculine women live in constant terror of the threat of violence. However, it is important to note that the violence is aimed disproportionately at feminine men, transfeminine people and at femininity in general, which suggests that homophobia and sissyphobia are basically misogyny, enacted on male-bodied people. This is not to say that masculine women and transmasculine people do not face their own struggle against violence, but that the attacks on femininity are often much more intense, savage, and systematic. Some feminists, by focusing on the category of "woman" as the sole subject of feminism, ended up not paying enough attention to those who do not identify as either men or women or who are identified by others as somehow not in line with these categories.

But according to your own analysis, if it is "femininity" that is targeted, how is it not women as a class of people who are most targeted, given that women as a class are seen as "the feminine sex-class"? How does creating a category of cisgender privilege help or assist Two-Spirit women in prison, being pimped and trafficked, imprisoned and left to return to a culture destroyed by white masculinist men's ways of being? How does theorising about gender concretely help trans and non-trans people who will never, ever read one word of what's written. How does academic theoretical work produced primarily and overwhelmingly by VERY privileged white people concretely assist or support the efforts to survive of most trans people who are not Western, not English-speakers, who are poor, who are of color, and/or who are illiterate?

What you did there, in that paragraph, is insideously misogynistic and common in my readings by some Queer Theorists: positing non-women as the most oppressed by anti-feminine politics. In what universe, Theory-Q? Tell me exactly how non-trans girls from various regions of the Fourth, Third, and Second Worlds, as well as the so-called First, are less oppressed if trafficked as sex slaves than an academically trained, class-privileged transsexual person who has the presence of mind and untraumatised conditions within which to write about oppression by cisgender people? Are you aware of the levels of great privilege that are being promoted as normative for trans and non-trans people, when most trans and non-trans people have no such privileges? See this for more:

http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/radical-profeminist-analysis-of.html

You wrote:
Nevertheless – I do see how post-structuralist critiques of the idea of gender can be almost completely irrelevant in the context of, for example, a rape crisis center, female genital mutilation, or the fostering of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia. For the raped and battered woman, gender is unfortunately all too real and dithering on about its social construction may not be helpful (although, admittedly, understanding gender as a product of oppressive social forces, rather than natural instincts, may help to deal with the trauma). 

Theory-Q, from my encounters with many women across Africa and Asia, the term "FGM" (written out) is not preferred or viewed as respectful, as most women who I have heard from do not welcome having others, particularly white Westerners, identify them as "mutilated". It is a way whites have to relegate African women into the strange other. Again. If transsexuals don't appreciate being termed "mutilated" why would you assume anyone would? Do you hear the women themselves, so harmed, name themselves that way? And what about gender and race Apartheid in the U.S., on reservations? What about race and gender Apartheid among Black and Brown people in the U.S. Why do you need to travel across seas to arrive at populations who are not helped at all by Academic, post-structural abstractionism? Or, for that matter, modernist abstractionism?

You wrote:
Ultimately, while the “here-and-now” work of ending gendered violence – and violence in general – may draw on some academic ideas, it is not at all dependent on them.

This appears to me to go against much of what you've argued thus far.

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And the dominance of the "critiquing the idea of gender" view in academia has served to divert attention away from practical efforts to combat the continuing structural violence against women and feminine persons, from the struggles for liberation waged by feminists around the world, and from the connections between movements for environmental sustainability, racial justice, and women’s survival. Academia has betrayed activism – there is no doubt about this. Academics are, as such, unwittingly complicit with those who wish to continue the violence, the oppression, the hatred, and the murder. 

This also appears to contradict much of what you've written above. And that is my main point. So basically we are in agreement. You've noted our many places of agreement throughout, and perhaps I've not been acknowledging them as forthrightly as you have. I apologise for that.

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But this does not mean that we should completely discard intellectual responses to oppression! 

I've never called for such a thing. I've called for curbing Academic elitism, needless abstractionism, and the privileging of theories that work well in supporting and furthering white het male supremacy's aims and accomplishments.

You wrote:

As I outlined in my discussion of genocide above, there is a place for both the practical work of ensuring that mass slaughter does not happen (providing resources to populations likely to be affected, giving out humanitarian aid,

I've never talked here about giving out humanitarian aid, which too often appears to be done but is not done; instead the appearance of it being done allows white countries to pat themselves on the back stating how many millions have been raised for relief in Haiti, for example, that Haitians never see. I recommend reading this book, for more:

http://www.incite-national.org/index.php?s=89

You wrote:

 developing international institutional mechanisms to prevent genocide) and the intellectual work of critiquing the ideas and world-views that make large-scale killing conceivable and possible in the first place. 

I wish you'd stop equating genocide with killing-only. Genocide is many things. It includes residential boarding schools in North America. Children were not killed there, usually. But they were severely abused, sexually and spiritually, physically and emotionally. That's genocide-in-practice. So too is ghettoising people on reservations without ecosystem/land/water/animal/plat resources to survive. See Ward Churchill's writings on the subject of U.S. genocide. Here's one quote:

"Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source... To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide."

• Churchill, Ward (November 2004). w:Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. p. 79.ISBN 0872864340.

You wrote:

Ideally, the two should not be separated and they should work in tandem, although I do see how, in a condition of primary emergency, the “here-and-now” work of ensuring the killing [and non-murderous while also genocidal actions--added by Julian] is prevented and helping the (potential) victims is more important. I believe that, in academia and in the broader society, there should be a place for practical activist work on ending oppression and for the more theoretical endeavor of thinking about the ideas and conditions that make structural violence possible. It is unacceptable that the former is currently marginalized and this situation needs to be changed. 

It's difficult for me to read that. Why? I guess because I've seen how you've critiqued Noam Chomsky and some feminists for describing problems without offering solutions. I regard you as an important voice: please put forth suggestion for how to make the Academy accountable to radical activists, or how to make theory directly helpful to those being most marginalised and harmed. (Note: the most marginalised and harmed, contrary to what many white, Western, class-privileged, academically trained, non-prostituted, non-trafficked  pro-trans activists claim are not Western, white, class-privileged, academically educated, non-prostituted, non-trafficked trans people. Nor are they rich, white, het non-trans men who feel their rights and resources are being taken away. Poor dears. And I wish pro-trans activists would remember that most trans people aren't transsexual, aren't white, aren't Western, and aren't middle class before putting forth truly ignorant analytic reports of alleged cis gender privileges--that most cis gender people don't even have.)

You wrote:
On the subject of post-structuralism, I don’t think that ideas about the normative foundations for (and functions of) empirical claims are entirely useless for activists. The way that I was laying out my position on this issue was far too depoliticized, and I see how you could have perceived my point of view as fundamentally impractical and nihilistic. When I said that different empirical claims about how the world "is" are tied to normative ideas about how the world "should be," I should have added that empirical world-views are index-linked to specific power-political interests, often buttressing oppressive social structures. Thus, supposedly "empirical" claims about women’s physical and intellectual capacities have served to ensure that women remain physically weaker than men and that they are excluded from academic, scientific and political positions. Activists could therefore use post-structuralist ideas about the connection between ideas about how the world "is" and nefarious political goals in order to undermine the worldviews that form some of the foundations of structural inequality. I certainly don’t think that oppression originates in the improper "exchange" of ideas, nor do I believe that ideas are "freely exchanged." Rather, I would argue that one of the primary ways that structural inequalities of power are maintained is through the propagation of ideas about reality that have the function of upholding them, that make them seem invisible, and that make them appear natural. 

Again, the primary means are not production of ideas, but rather maintenance of systems of force and coercion, through use of force and coercion-- exercised by these systems, among others: military, police, prison, psychiatric, court; also supported in institutions like dominant religions, social institutions like marriage, and educational institutions like the Academy. Also implicated is the production of ideas-expressed-as-graphic-material-not-text, such as those hate speech-loaded, patriarchally propagandistic materials produced by the pornography and advertising industries, raking in millions over the raped bodies of girls and women, and trans people too, and not a few boys and men also.

You wrote:
In my work, I aim to evaluate claims about "reality" not only on the extent to which are truthful but also on the basis of whose interests and which normative goals they will uphold. I therefore support any depictions of reality which uphold the interests of women, queer folks, indigenous peoples, and non-whites. This does not mean that I view things like whether patriarchy exists or whether American Indians are under assault as "debatable" – and this is a charge that is often thrown at people engaging in post-structuralist analysis: "you doubt whether the sky is really blue and you might even believe that pigs can fly." This is not at all the case, and I think it is a profound misreading of post-structural theory (caused in some cases by the obscurity of the kind of writing this theory inspires). 

It is a legitimate critique of any discursive style designed--with or without conscious intention--to effectively distance us from the harshness and harm of the reality most people on Earth experience every day. Most post-structural theory is completely inaccessible and is not useful to anyone doing direct front-line work against oppression.

You wrote:

But while there is no need to debate the existence of patriarchy or the oppression of non-whites, there are questions about these phenomena that are definitely worth much consideration, the answers to which will directly impact how they are dealt with: what causes patriarchy?

The practices (expressed through institutions and interpersonal actions of racist patriarchal power) which comprise it cause it and maintain it. These have been well-described by many women over many decades. That work is done. You acknowledge you have not read the bulk of it. Why aren't you doing that? Why are you studying Iceland instead of reading Conquest, by Andrea Smith? Or Black Feminist Thought and Black Sexual Politics, both by Patricia Hill Collins. Or Yurugu, by Marimba Ani? Or Letters From a War Zone, by Andrea Dworkin? Or Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Are Women Human?, by C. A. MacKinnon?

You wrote:

Through which mechanisms does it work?

The ones women have named many times, for the last forty years, in dozens of books, in hundreds of speeches. 

You wrote:

Does it exist in all societies, and if not, under what conditions has it not existed? Why is it currently in place? What are the causes of racism? Why does it exist and how does it work? 

These are, to me, diversionary and unnecessarily obfuscating questions. And you basically acknowledge this here:

You wrote:

Getting to the vital issue – "what is to be done?" – first requires thinking about and responding to some of the questions such as the ones I enumerated above. 

They've been answered, Theory-Q. Someone once said when you enter a conversation with serious intent to contribute, it is incumbent upon you to know what's already been said on the subject. You haven't done your homework, in my view. And so many questions that have excellent answers remain inaccessible and undigested by you. Your questions imply the questions haven't been asked and answered, many times over. This demonstrates to me that you are coming in "cold", so to speak. And I find that to be disrespectful to all the women who fought hard and died disappointed, because people refused to engage with them seriously, dismissing them as crazy, man-hating, b-words.

You wrote:
I am also by no means requesting that Andrea Dworkin and others put forward their positions solely in “this-is-how-I-see-it” terms. I do not see worldviews and theories as being a "personal" thing, with each individual having their own unique way of seeing things. This would be to deny the social nature of knowledge and to make all claims about the world contingent purely on individual experience. Rather, what I noticed in Dworkin’s approach

Which you have yet to accurately learn about, understand, and describe, Theory-Q.

You wrote:

 is a long-standing tradition in Western (especially liberal and capitalist) thought of conceptualizing individuals as rational actors, seeking to minimize costs and maximize benefits.

Dworkin isn't speaking about individuals, and this ought to be very clear from reading anything she's written. Her analysis of gender is class-based. When she's talking about "men" she's speaking about a gendered group politically structured over and against women, who find identity and status, who maintain privileges, power, and entitlements, by putting women down and keeping women down, through various means. And girls and other people deemed effeminate.

You wrote:

 I also noticed that, in line with social contract theory, Dworkin imbued very large collectives with the capacity to form informal pacts, think rationally, and operate for their own survival. I am sorry if I gave this impression – but I was not critiquing the views laid out in Pornography because they were Dworkin’s personal views, or because they were the views of a white woman, but rather because those views were based on certain ontological assumptions about human nature and society which have a long and distinguished history in Western philosophy and with which I have disagreements – this is as much a critique of Dworkin as it is a critique of, for example,Adam Smith or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls. I was also not criticizing Dworkin’s views so that I, as a "white man" (for the record, I don’t identify as a "man"), can claim objectivity and ownership of the way the world really "is." My post was written in the style of a philosophy-student-cum-wannabe-academic:

It comes across to me as unnecessarily arrogant and presumptuous. I honestly don't get the sense you are either, and so I'm wondering why you're employing a discursive style that comes across this way. And, of course, we may disagree about how it comes across. Informal pacts are made among white men--such as to commit various crimes and cover each other's asses; such as to keep resources directed at the wealthy and not the poor; such as to get one another elected to town councils, state office, and other political offices; to keep one another the dominant groups on boards of trustees; by promoting one another over women. And it is done formally, in police-enforced laws, in juried and judged courtrooms wherein women who report being battered systematically lose custody of their children to their batterer because accusing a man of battery is seen in courtrooms across the West as "being mean to the children's father", and through other systems of classist, racist, misogyny.

You wrote:

 you might think that this is an oppressive identity to take on, 

I think it is needlessly arrogant and presumptuous, as noted. And, in places, not only not useful to activists' struggles for liberation, but actively, if not intentionally, uncaring and/or callous to such activism and activists, and the inhumanity and atrocities being endured.

You wrote:

or that this is the identity that "white men" who want to author reality adopt. There is truth to this, but as I described above, there is also a positive side to academic intellectual thought and this is what I want to be a part of on Below the Belt.

I haven't seen much of the positive side, although I experience you as on the side of justice. I just don't see that active support manifesting in your writing as yet. This is my hunch, Theory-Q, and I could be VERY wrong here. First, I like you. From what little I've read by you, I see that you are serious, earnest, and thoughtful, as I've already noted. I don't see you as cynical or sarcastic, which already separates you from most writers. I see you as not terribly abstract, which separates you from most academic writers.

I felt happy to come across your work and this blog, which isn't to say I don't have and won't continue to have significant disagreements with some of what is being presented here as liberatory. I don't accept that transgression is liberation. I don't accept that liberalism is radically useful to activists or people struggling to survive, and rather believe it is part of a larger problem--of being removed from the world of suffering. 

I welcome you to join me in that world, and to identify the places where you struggle, to identify your own pain and privilege, and to locate yourself consistently as an ally with the  people who will never have the privileges you and I do, who are working to end oppression because their/our lives depend on it.