ryrysparkleby:

ardhra:

ourcatastrophe:

ardhra:

ourcatastrophe:

it honestly seems like some leftists believe that only conservative politics are promulgated within the family so we should just ignore kids and wait until they get to college

which would be repugnant even if it were true

but it’s not true

lots of radicals have kids, lots of them pass their values onto their kids, you just don’t see them, because you push them out of your collectives and sharehouses and radical reading groups

but probably they don’t even wanna see your misogynist, racist, anti-working-class, child-hating face

This is just off the top of my head, but it’s not just to do with children, maternity or family responsibilities, it’s broader and to do with internalised capitalist assumptions about work… there’s been heaps written about “activism” and the tendency towards hyper-commitment and burnout, and how capitalist work ethics are partly behind that. I think the assumption is that it’s an individual responsibility to facilitate being able to do work/activism, however they manage that - the partner who has less $ to lose by staying at home with the kid (a woman, 90+% of the time) does so, you pick menial jobs and deliberately structure your life so you’ll never have to support anyone else (even people you probably should be supporting) so you can activist more… and that’s why there’s so much gross scrutiny about peoples’ personal choices in food/hairstyle/shoes - these personal choices are all supposed to facilitate doing more work.

But there’s never any discussion about how “the movement” or “the campaign” might actually be responsible for any of that. Or why it should be, or how. Because that’s “service delivery” not actual politics - with the subtext being that people who need “service delivery” aren’t important to “the movement” or to politics, because politics is something that can be abstracted from life. And so uni students are more important to “the movement” than anyone else because they’re deliberately cosseted into an environment where they have minimal responsibilities for others, and due to class barriers, inaccessibility, ablism, racism, and a whole lot of other structural inequality built into tertiary education, tend to have few personal needs of their own.

Ugh, too much rambly. I should go to bed.

totally.  I remember thinking it was really weird that Melbourne Uni had a more visible and active Student Activist population than the more working-class Victoria University — I mean, what did Melbourne Uni students really have to protest about?  Now I get it — the whole concept of the Student Activist is set up for this.  and getting out of caring responsibilities to spend more time doing activism is somehow seen as being more responsible!  serious!  yet activism, like caring, is seen not as a social responsibility, but as a personal choice, one that requires sacrifices and can’t, indeed shouldn’t, be supported by broader social structures. 

it’s like a weird vanguardism or something, except Lenin had way more of an idea of how, exactly, the vanguard’s actions would radicalise and mobilise the general population.  there’s certainly no serious expectation that the majority of people will be able to join this activist class — after all, somebody needs to do the actual productive labour.  somebody needs to grow the food, make the trains run on time, care for the old and the sick and the young, pay the taxes that go towards the activists’ dole, throw out the food they dumpster…like, I’m not against dumpster diving, I’d do it if it was a bit easier where I lived, I’m on the dole myself, partly because I want time to do other things so I’m being picky about jobs, I’m thoroughly implicated in this, I’m not just having a kneejerk “lazy hippies” reaction.

it’s just that on a very basic economic level, this activist lifestyle is predicated on being a small fringe group.  our society could not support a significantly larger activist class.  can the activist class act to destroy itself as a class?  because that is what a significant attack on the power of capitalism, imperialism, etc would entail and indeed require. but in a lot of ways it’s a sweet fucking lifestyle.  can they (we?) act against their own class interest like that? 

(bolding for emphasis is all mine)

This is kind of why I think that activist groups aren’t actually about creating a better society, but about reproducing themselves in their own image, as parasitically as possible because it takes less effort… if they were serious about creating a better society, they’d be scrutinising the techniques and strategies they use more closely and applying what they learn to improve what they do. Instead, they recycle defunct methods that neoliberalism and especially policing learned to outmanoeuvre decades ago, except for the fact that they kind of work to reproduce Activists in the image of practised socialists, anarchists, environmentalists, etc.

But I’ll have to get back to you on what the alternative is… I’m kind of thinking it might have to do with what we’ve talked about before re: accountability and case management/individual advocacy…

yes! i have been thinking about this stuff recently, especially since a few weeks ago i was at a pub with these two guys who were going on and on about how to ‘radicalize the masses/workers’ and seemed to be from this uni activist background and just moved into union stuff…then i was trying to tell them there are already heaps or people critical of the system, how i am a worker [sex worker] and now that i have left the weird middle class activist scene of university and doing more activism around sex worker rights in australia - its obvious there are so many more people that these men seem to think ‘aren’t political’- i asked them what about sex workers, what about single mums? and they just looked at me weirdly, like what? And i’m trying to explain like its not so much people aren’t already critical of the ways our society runs especially obviously the people who are marginalized most by it, but like you probably never even talk to many say sex workers and single mums because these weird activisty communities you hang out in with ‘full time activists’ are not accomodating to many people, especially people who are carers (inc single mums) and are like built around weird ideas that the people who are ‘full time activists’ don’t need to work to support other people, or spend time caring for others in our communities and families who are being hounded by cops, raising kids with no child support, looking after younger siblings, parents fighting for their kids from government trying to take them away from criminal charges or sex work and drug use etc etc.
I don’t know, its like raising kids is seen as conservative no matter what, but investing energy in middle class uni kids is rad and worthwhile and raising kids and people doing paid work to support people around them is never seen as activist work or positive work in building communities but going to actions getting arrested for a lock on is really radical! i dont even know what the point is, they just kind of looked at me blankly, and were like ‘but isnt prostitution legal in NSW?’ when i was explaining lots of sex workers for example probably have better critiques of the police and the state and our society than youse anyway… and then they went back to discussing whether marx was still relevant or something…

Yeah, I remember when I was involved in campaigning against the Northern Territory Intervention, all these white kids were like “why aren’t Aboriginal people who live locally getting involved in this campaign” cos we were meeting in Redfern. And while we were meeting I came across all these Aboriginal people talking about how family members had been arrested, and they had to go into the lock-up at an absurd hour of the night, or they had to take care of family members in from out of town… but none of that really counts as political apparently because it’s not protesting? Well, maybe making sure one Aboriginal person makes it to their 18th, 29th, 50th, 72nd birthday is politically important too? Like, maybe people here are suffering under oppressive government policy but it’s not as simple as a single Bill or Act or Intervention that you can name in a slogan, but the only way to fight it is fight for one person at a time and actually fight for all of that person, for the whole person….

For everyone except white middle class people nurturing is fucking political.

swampkhaleesi:

Also because it’s because I’ve been hiding under a rock that I haven’t been able to say anything but-

One of the major universities in my state (pfft why am I being so secretive about it, it’s UWA) comes out with this parody newspaper every year called PROSH. I get that a lot of the content is to make parody of how most of Australia does view minority groups and all AND yes I understand that the profits made from the sale of this newspaper go to a collection of charities and all but

They really did screw it up big time especially regarding to a section called “Indigenous Horoscopes” which was essentially a page full of disgusting stereotypes geared towards Indigenous people. Now the university and the team behind the newspaper this newspaper have received a lot of much needed criticism and I do hope that this can only lead to more constructive conversation on how we other and isolate and so on

HOWEVER in light of all of this, the one Indigenous foundation who would have received sponsorship (ICEA also known as Indigenous Communities Education & Awareness Foundation), has pulled out (and rightfully so) due to the offensive nature of this article stating

“In this day and age, it is totally unacceptable and morally corrupt that any organisation or group of people perpetuate mistruths about indigenous people,”.

They are a fantastic group an they do so much work for the community, AND they will be working hard to get more funding now because of this- so if you do have the means, please donate to ICEA!

ourcatastrophe:

ardhra:

ourcatastrophe:

it honestly seems like some leftists believe that only conservative politics are promulgated within the family so we should just ignore kids and wait until they get to college

which would be repugnant even if it were true

but it’s not true

lots of radicals have kids, lots of them pass their values onto their kids, you just don’t see them, because you push them out of your collectives and sharehouses and radical reading groups

but probably they don’t even wanna see your misogynist, racist, anti-working-class, child-hating face

This is just off the top of my head, but it’s not just to do with children, maternity or family responsibilities, it’s broader and to do with internalised capitalist assumptions about work… there’s been heaps written about “activism” and the tendency towards hyper-commitment and burnout, and how capitalist work ethics are partly behind that. I think the assumption is that it’s an individual responsibility to facilitate being able to do work/activism, however they manage that - the partner who has less $ to lose by staying at home with the kid (a woman, 90+% of the time) does so, you pick menial jobs and deliberately structure your life so you’ll never have to support anyone else (even people you probably should be supporting) so you can activist more… and that’s why there’s so much gross scrutiny about peoples’ personal choices in food/hairstyle/shoes - these personal choices are all supposed to facilitate doing more work.

But there’s never any discussion about how “the movement” or “the campaign” might actually be responsible for any of that. Or why it should be, or how. Because that’s “service delivery” not actual politics - with the subtext being that people who need “service delivery” aren’t important to “the movement” or to politics, because politics is something that can be abstracted from life. And so uni students are more important to “the movement” than anyone else because they’re deliberately cosseted into an environment where they have minimal responsibilities for others, and due to class barriers, inaccessibility, ablism, racism, and a whole lot of other structural inequality built into tertiary education, tend to have few personal needs of their own.

Ugh, too much rambly. I should go to bed.

totally.  I remember thinking it was really weird that Melbourne Uni had a more visible and active Student Activist population than the more working-class Victoria University — I mean, what did Melbourne Uni students really have to protest about?  Now I get it — the whole concept of the Student Activist is set up for this.  and getting out of caring responsibilities to spend more time doing activism is somehow seen as being more responsible!  serious!  yet activism, like caring, is seen not as a social responsibility, but as a personal choice, one that requires sacrifices and can’t, indeed shouldn’t, be supported by broader social structures. 

it’s like a weird vanguardism or something, except Lenin had way more of an idea of how, exactly, the vanguard’s actions would radicalise and mobilise the general population.  there’s certainly no serious expectation that the majority of people will be able to join this activist class — after all, somebody needs to do the actual productive labour.  somebody needs to grow the food, make the trains run on time, care for the old and the sick and the young, pay the taxes that go towards the activists’ dole, throw out the food they dumpster…like, I’m not against dumpster diving, I’d do it if it was a bit easier where I lived, I’m on the dole myself, partly because I want time to do other things so I’m being picky about jobs, I’m thoroughly implicated in this, I’m not just having a kneejerk “lazy hippies” reaction.

it’s just that on a very basic economic level, this activist lifestyle is predicated on being a small fringe group.  our society could not support a significantly larger activist class.  can the activist class act to destroy itself as a class?  because that is what a significant attack on the power of capitalism, imperialism, etc would entail and indeed require. but in a lot of ways it’s a sweet fucking lifestyle.  can they (we?) act against their own class interest like that? 

(bolding for emphasis is all mine)

This is kind of why I think that activist groups aren’t actually about creating a better society, but about reproducing themselves in their own image, as parasitically as possible because it takes less effort… if they were serious about creating a better society, they’d be scrutinising the techniques and strategies they use more closely and applying what they learn to improve what they do. Instead, they recycle defunct methods that neoliberalism and especially policing learned to outmanoeuvre decades ago, except for the fact that they kind of work to reproduce Activists in the image of practised socialists, anarchists, environmentalists, etc.

But I’ll have to get back to you on what the alternative is… I’m kind of thinking it might have to do with what we’ve talked about before re: accountability and case management/individual advocacy…

woh-battameez:

ardhra:

US-centrism is people in Australia following the US news cycle incessantly about violence in Boston, but having no awareness of violence in Bangalore, and simply being desensitised to violence in Baghdad.

Oh yes we do the same here, following and reporting and writing about Boston violence, from newspapers and news networks to laypeople. US-centrism also allows us to neatly stratify these tragedies, on a large matrix, that decides some lives are worth talking about, others need not even figure in the same sentence. 

And US-centrism is a compulsion. If you don’t empathise with these tragedies*, you’re immediately a monster. 

—-

*Empathy isn’t the point here. It’s the need to see empathy from everyone the US talks to, while they in turn are *allowed* and given *full impunity* to be literal and figurative monsters to the people they’re killing  in “benevolence”, I suppose. 

The thing is, too, that the Islamophobia in the USA is transported  to other western locations - a good number of people I’ve seen commenting about the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent shootings/lockdown/manhunt are people of colour afraid for their safety.

But that’s a side effect of white USAmerican lives being seen as worth more than anyone else’s, to the point where nobody even bothers naming victims of bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, and we’ll never see memorials for those people or testimonies from their loved ones, though a good number of both the dead and their loved ones are 8 years old or younger.

There’s also the issue that US-centrism usually serves to mask the actual race and communal power relations outside of the USA, where you can so easily import these narratives through everyone’s lounge rooms, smartphones, and computers…

ourcatastrophe:

it honestly seems like some leftists believe that only conservative politics are promulgated within the family so we should just ignore kids and wait until they get to college

which would be repugnant even if it were true

but it’s not true

lots of radicals have kids, lots of them pass their values onto their kids, you just don’t see them, because you push them out of your collectives and sharehouses and radical reading groups

but probably they don’t even wanna see your misogynist, racist, anti-working-class, child-hating face

This is just off the top of my head, but it’s not just to do with children, maternity or family responsibilities, it’s broader and to do with internalised capitalist assumptions about work… there’s been heaps written about “activism” and the tendency towards hyper-commitment and burnout, and how capitalist work ethics are partly behind that. I think the assumption is that it’s an individual responsibility to facilitate being able to do work/activism, however they manage that - the partner who has less $ to lose by staying at home with the kid (a woman, 90+% of the time) does so, you pick menial jobs and deliberately structure your life so you’ll never have to support anyone else (even people you probably should be supporting) so you can activist more… and that’s why there’s so much gross scrutiny about peoples’ personal choices in food/hairstyle/shoes - these personal choices are all supposed to facilitate doing more work.

But there’s never any discussion about how “the movement” or “the campaign” might actually be responsible for any of that. Or why it should be, or how. Because that’s “service delivery” not actual politics - with the subtext being that people who need “service delivery” aren’t important to “the movement” or to politics, because politics is something that can be abstracted from life. And so uni students are more important to “the movement” than anyone else because they’re deliberately cosseted into an environment where they have minimal responsibilities for others, and due to class barriers, inaccessibility, ablism, racism, and a whole lot of other structural inequality built into tertiary education, tend to have few personal needs of their own.

Ugh, too much rambly. I should go to bed.

US-centrism is people in Australia following the US news cycle incessantly about violence in Boston, but having no awareness of violence in Bangalore, and simply being desensitised to violence in Baghdad.

redlightpolitics:

I live in cracks and nooks. I exist nowhere and everywhere. My feminism is a territory cast aside from the big island that is Feminism, at least, the feminism that everyone has been discussing regarding #femfuture.

There is this US territory, not coded as such but as “online feminism” (presented as neutral, deterritorialized, homogenous) but this construction is not online feminism, it is American or perhaps North American, or should I go all Latina and just call it what it is: Anglo feminism and then there is me in the sidelines. So, when Jessica Luther wondered out loud what I thought (there have been a lot of polemics about the report), I sincerely have no thoughts because I don’t belong in this.

To call what is going on in an Anglo centric environment “online feminism” is to cast me (and millions like me) away from the umbrella. We live elsewhere. We communicate in English but we are not part of the culture that is being discussed. We are the outsiders that have issues that are alien to this “online feminism”. I highlight the attack on reproductive rights going on in the US as much as I can, but this is not my personal fight; I point to the need of US immigration reform as much as I come across topics that cover it, but my reason of existence is EU immigration reform and its intersections with gender; when something that happened in the US needs denouncing to harness the collective attention, I gladly lend myself to it because I believe feminism is not a zero sum game (i.e. if I spend a few minutes or hours talking about an issue in North America, it doesn’t detract from my long term goals about policies, racism and gender in Europe). However, that’s not my “online feminism”. I might get lumped into the term because I communicate in English but my reality is rather different: I live in Amsterdam.

And here’s what happens when you inhabit these cracks: you pretty much don’t exist. Years ago when I started writing publicly, I made the decision to write in English (instead of Spanish or Dutch) because a) it’s the language most spoken in my surrounding and b) my written Dutch is appalling. I lack nuance, I lack depth, I have the vocabulary of a child and quite frankly, it’s a language that limits my ability to communicate on the level I wanted to. Besides, when in 2002, the Euro came in, I quickly threw myself into the political consequences of this Union and I thought I’d be more effective writing in a language that is widely spoken within the area. However, because I am simultaneously in (i.e. part of this online feminism by virtue of writing, blogging, creating media, etc in the English language) and outside (i.e. I live in Europe and the bulk of what I write and communicate is about WoC living in Europe), I get pretty much ignored. When feminist organizations in The Netherlands organize events, they do not know I exist. Sure, I know for a fact I am read by some (in fact, the biggest feminist NGO in the country has me listed in their blogroll), but I do not speak the “local language”. Oh I do speak Dutch all right. But I speak of a feminism that is practically alien to them. I shout about immigration reform and death of WoC, I yell about State violence directed at WoC, I insist on the hierarchical nature of a White Supremacist Patriarchal State… all the topics that local feminist organizations won’t touch with a ten foot pole. So, I simply do not get invited. They will happily bring Caitlin Moran over from the UK to give a talk (they did last year) but those like me simply do not exist locally.

Then there is the American version of online feminism, which has other realities and other goals and other culturally relevant issues, to which I do not get invited either because frankly, I have nothing of meaning to contribute (thousands of WoC are doing that locally and passionately, so why would anyone bring me over to talk about what people with better local knowledge and ideas are already doing?). In the UK, the online feminist discourses seem to be dangerously US centric as well. The exception being Black feminists who are contributing a wealth of knowledge and creating their own epistemic histories but that is not (yet) mainstream UK feminism. Mainstream is, once again, Caitlin Moran. Online, British feminism looks either inward (rightfully so, because they are focused in their local issues) or towards the US (as if the US was the feminist Mother Ship one should aspire to) but there isn’t much in terms of a European focus. “Things” happen either in the UK or in the US and once again… I inhabit another space.

So, all these talks about #femfuture are certainly not about me. If anything, I try to firmly stand my ground so as not to be colonized by this increasingly US centric version of online feminism. My resistance ends up being a double bind: I need to resist the policies, racism, discrimination, etc of a State that considers those like me disposable and I need to resist the absorption of the “Mother Ship” that owns the discourses around which feminist issues matter the most. In the meantime, I can tell you this much: my #femfuture is about yelling louder. Because really, there isn’t much else I can do, further than assimilating (which, no) in order to create the awareness I believe is needed.

God, do I know this feeling. It’s mostly why I stopped capital-b blogging.

What rankles as well is that here there are some pretty vocal & strong voices from women of colour. But often white feminists in Australia will ignore them in favour of an analysis of racial justice coming from the USA. Sometimes in favour of people coming from the USA.

Also, Flavia is more generous than I am, I suppose. After trying to be heard by US-centric bloggers, only to be told I was “doing nothing” and “build it yourself”, I pretty much gave up on showing solidarity when none was being shown my way.

eshusplayground:

undertheteacup:

eshusplayground:

I wonder why that is.

Hmmm, because Gabrielle is cute and sweet and caring and all these other things typically associated with femininity which are devalued?

There’s that, sure, but I think it goes deeper.

I’ve been thinking of this off and on, and I believe that, when it comes down to it, Xena knows that Gabrielle loves her as a person while Caesar and Ares love the idea of her. I notice that they only love the parts of her that they associate with power and domination. They are oblivious to, discount, or outright ignore those aspects of Xena that don’t pertain to power and domination. Gabrielle saw and appreciated more facets of Xena than any of these powerful males ever conceived of, and I think that’s significant and points to a particular weakness when it comes to people (especially men) whose first love is power.