that their beauty is forced down every woc’s throat. that’s why we can’t handle a movie claiming they suffer the most from oppressive beauty standards even if it was fictional, because in reality beauty standards are exclusively made with white women in mind and values you higher than the rest of us.
this
Before we go on, I have to ask: how much is my answer worth to you? And I mean, in cold, hard cash.
I know they’re not all that fucking traumatic to white people.
I smacked a girl for calling me a n***** in the 6th grade.
Guess who was punished?
Guess who wasn’t punished for calling me a racial slur?
Guess which one of us was bullied afterwards?
Even IF black people harm you, the system will work for your favor, no matter what violence you committed to them in the first place.
Punched a guy for calling me a “fucking dirty nigger” in 10th. No one was fucking with me after that, even that guy.
It was a bit different for me. It resulted in me being bullied even more, I guess because she wasn’t punished, so all the white kids figured out they could do whatever they wanted and not get in trouble.
It took a couple of more fights and me yelling at people to get my message across.
Wow, that’s seriously fucked up. White people stay schemin! Hope it’s alright for you now, mate.
Yeah, I graduated from K-12 LONG ago, and white people who bullied me are still stuck in that same old town, and they’ll just probably stay there.
This was my youth. Less n-words overall though.
And, WTF, tumblr stripped out my commentary…
There is a great thread on tumblr on choice, sex - work and labour, linking here because I don’t want to take the discussion away from that thread. While I agree with most of what everythingbutharleyquinn said, couldn’t help but wonder at the similar-but-not-entirely existence of sex-work here. For many bar-dancers, sex-workers, prostitutes in India, neither narratives of “choice” nor “coercion” can do justice at articulating their positions. Again, would appreciate it if anyone who chimes in here knows South Asian politics, the history of caste within and across South Asian communities and understands the role of sexuality (rather sexual violence) in nation-building in South Asia. For this thread, I’m not discussing Dalit Hijra and/or Arvani sex-workers, I’m sorely under-read in the area (+ no political participation in mobilising with hijra sex-workers), if anyone can please do jump in and add your perspective.
—-
First the facts:
— Sex-work is, and has been a largely caste-based occupation. The visibility of middle-class, English-speaking, city-dwelling sex workers (escorts) doesn’t change the fact that most of the sex industry (particularly the sexual entertainment industry i.e. Lavni performers, Devdasis* etc) have ALWAYS been caste-based occupations.— Most women in the sexual entertainment industry have various job trajectories: they are rag-pickers, public toilet cleaners, morgue managers, sewage cleaners (a very fancy term for what they actually do), again these are caste-based occupations. It is not a co-incidence that women from these occupations make it to the sexual entertainment industry.
— Point of clarification: There are many people who have entered the sexual entertainment industry (speaking particularly of people from lower caste, Dalit sects) by choice. But choice is a dicey term here considering there are very few things they are “allowed” to do by the prevailing caste order — sewage cleaning, doing menial labour etc are the “choices” of jobs**.— There is a lot of feminist organising *with* and *against* caste-based sex-work, the Maharashtra Ban on Dance Bars in 2005 is a defining moment for the women’s movement in West India, where two opposing camps emerged. One basically said, “But these women have choice and agency so the ban cannot happen” and another said “caste-based sexual exploitation cannot be continued any further”. The problem with both of these perspectives, how can one talk of the *safety* of the sex-workers/prostitutes/sexual slaves (not using either of these terms lightly) if one is pro-ban? Given these are caste-based occupations, definitely exploitative, but keeping it illegal also makes their lives difficult. Then again, legalisation of the sexual entertainment industry means the State *admitting* to its *overt* role in keeping and feeding off of the caste system***.
— Banning the sexual entertainment industry definitely paves a way for a moral high ground while brilliantly failing to see how — coerced and otherwise — migration, labour and political economies are organised to keep certain castes in certain occupations only. To insist banning sex-work is a way forward to annihilating caste *WITHOUT* talking about “choice” and “coercion” in occupations like sewage cleaning, managing morgues, rag picking etc is pointless. The caste system cannot be annihilated when looked at in sections, be those of sexuality, labour and/or gender. Because NO ONE experiences marginalisation and privilege in pockets.
— The point here isn’t really about “But choice!” or “But coercion!”, but mainly who can even “afford” these distinctions. Rather, who benefits from these labels — be it feminists, Leftists or the State. Who can “decide” to “choose gender over caste” etc. And from benefits I mean grants, research projects, funds from the State and NGO’s.
— Coming to the sex-workers/prostitutes, again there is a divide. Some organise to legalise their occupation, some recognise and spell out the complicated choices they make, some feed into the tragedyporn narrative. Pointing in their direction and saying “See it’s their choice!” or “See how they were forced” is an incredibly narrow understanding of their lives.
Reaching my typing limit, so quickly about sexual violence, South Asia and nation-building.
— India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka have *recorded* histories of sexual violence *during* the time of each nation’s quest for Independence. Specifically, the Partition for India and Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladeshi War of Indendence in 1971 and the Sri Lankan Civil War (roughly from 1983 to 2009) have *recorded* histories of extreme sexual violence from both civilians and the State in these time periods.— Bangladesh talks of the “Birongonas” (some 20000 women who were raped in the war of independence), holds West Pakistan (now Pakistan) responsible but remains silent on their culpability in the rapes of advivasi people in the Chittagong Hill tracts in 2011. Similarly India waxes a ton of hatred where the Partition is concerned, but won’t ever speak of how Hindus raped, killed and coercively married Muslim women, sexual violence in both the Bangladeshi War of Independence or the Sri Lankan Civil War (the IPKF specifically speaking). The history of South Asia is intimately tied with sexual violence, many survivors (first and/or third generation) of this violence are in the sex industry. This isn’t a co-incidence, and to what extent is it a choice, or structural exploitation, we won’t know****.
TL;DR — To say “choice!” and “legalise everything” is not so easy, mainly because it would bring to light the very crimes ALL of these States will never officially admit to. To speak of sex-work within South Asia without looking at its complex history would be doing any debate on sex-work a great disservice.
——-
*These are all illegal occupations now. However, the practice of Devdasi is alive and well, most Devdasis are prostitutes (using this term carefully) since they no longer receive any maintenance from the temple-lords who they are “gifted” to, on account of the occupation being illegal. Lavni has been co-opted into Bollywood, where Bollywood actors perform the Lavni of course, pushing the people from this occupation into structural irrelevance, with extremely limited options — most are sex-workers.**Depends on which part of India one is from. Many Northern states “allow” lower caste and Dalit women to be firewood collectors, cultivate food in “common wastelands”, many Southern states “allow” women of certain castes to only be Devdasis, most of West India “allows” lower caste and/or Dalit women to be bonded labourers etc.
***There is no “good side” to the caste system. The caste system is founded on econmic, gender, sexual and religious inequality, there are STRUCTURES IN PLACE to keep the inequality alive.
****Resource collecting becomes a challenge itself, given how sex work is largely illegal and MANY survivors do not want to reveal their identities as survivors of sexual violence.
i do regret not putting a “the following statement is a reaction to dealing with someone who thinks that racism and the consumption of animals is the same thing”
because no, I don’t think the meat industry is a bright and glossy industry
I do believe the way the food industry is set requires a…
With all this whinging from veg*ans about how “unethical” meat-eaters are…
I can’t help but think of the fact that, in India, sometimes, even the rumour that you’ve slaughtered a certain animal can justify police lynching you, that the idea that someone slaughtered a cow can cause a mob to violently attack a community, and where, after millennia of oppression, the most oppressed community of people are both reviled and persecuted for eating beef, as well as dependent on it for their only source of sustenance and livelihood yet in many places are outlawed from slaughtering cows.
The whole thing just clearly demonstrates: militant vegans line up on the side of wealthy fascists.
i am at the uni guild space and have just been told to check my “meat eaters” privilege because my brunch is apparently oppressive. ha. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. no.
I’m sure there are worse vegans than uni vegans, but I’m not sure where they’d be found…
Animal Liberation
The thing is I don’t even know why I’m supposed to care that “Don’t you know that not all sex workers are trafficked victims! Don’t you know that some women who do sex work are educated and middle class and choose to be there?” its like yes yes i do know that because you never shut the fuck up about it, you never let those of us who were trafficked or forced or who had no other choice get a word in edge ways about it. You never let us, of whom there are far more of than those of you who choose to do it, talk about the way it laid waste to our lives, our histories our relationships, our ability to function as people are supposed to be able to function, you never let us care about the millions of women and children in the world who are in the situations we were in, who are being beaten, raped, sold, who have no choice no agency, no hope, you never let us talk about them, organize to help them, you never let us speak up against the men that hurt them, that hurt us, without having to tell us that we are terrible feminists because we don’t care that you chose to be a sex worker.
This is definitely something I’ve been thinking for a long ass time without being able to really voice it, because BAD FEMINIST!
And it has me straddling the sex-pos/sex-neg divide. It’s almost as if we were to say: hey lets not talk about domestic violence because some people choose to engage in BDSM! // Hey, lets not talk about the problematic shit about prostitution because some people choose sex work!
I don’t know.. Maybe I’m totally off kilter here, but I’ve been pondering this for a while now.
I don’t think you’re totally off kilter, but I think you’re not seeing the whole picture.
What happened to the OP is really shit and not okay, in any way, shape or form. And yeah, it happens to others too. And I want it to stop, and we should all want it to stop and we should all be working towards that.
And it’s totally fucked that there is a popular romantic vision of sex work that is getting perpetuated which can actively silence those voices.
And I think we have to look at the environments that helps create those narratives - ie, a virulently, violently whorephobic world that simultaneously punishes and condemns women for being in the sex industry at the same time it relentlessly deems us as victims - and, let us NOT forget, voraciously FEEDS on our stories. Against which there has been a contingent pushing back - perhaps arguably started with the sex worker memoir market, which is most definitely domineered by white, middle-class, educated, cis women, a privileged demographic whose voices are going to be preferenced no matter what the issue. With the rise of the internet, blogs and websites have sprung up as well. You have to understand that these voices, whilst not reflective of the majority, often express the internalised stigma we bear as a result of sex work. They’re trying to validate themselves by saying ‘we’re not like those other dirty whores’ in response to the amount of stigma and shame which is placed upon sex work - which throws the rest of us under the bus and I don’t like it and deeply resent it, but I can see where it comes from.
But the OP’s voice is not reflective of the majority either. Which does not make her voice any less important, but what it comes down to is: a black and white for or against dichotomy that ultimately serves no one, and I would say least of all those most disenfranchised amongst us.
As Pony points out here, the OP’s post expresses some pretty intense racism and classism. There are thousands of sex workers the world who are not white, middle-class or educated who work in countries where sex work is illegal and who therefore face horrific police brutality, increased potential violence from clients, targeting by predators and ostracisation from the general community as well as dodgy working conditions without easy access to health care or safe sex equipment, who work in sex work not perhaps because it is their first and best choice or even something they really want to do but because, for many reasons, it is the option they have, who are sometimes homeless and transient and underage and even considering ALL OF THIS, are still active participants and believers in sex workers rights and obtaining them, who have created their own grounds-roots organisations to campaign for their rights - because they recognise that the most critical aspect to minimising violence and exploitation of sex workers ARE rights.
This is what sex work abolitionists do not take into account. The many varying and intersecting reasons someone may end up in the sex industry. In countries where sex work is illegal it hasn’t STOPPED sex work. It just means sex workers are driven further underground, are practicing in really unsafe conditions, even more on the fringes of society with little to NO recourse to protection, least of all legal. Abolition ultimately ends up hurting sex workers more than it helps them - it makes them more vulnerable to predators AND justifies police persecution of them. FFS, in some places condoms are used as evidence of sex working and confiscated (best case scenario). But the worker who has no options other than sex work and can’t afford not to work - how is that helping that person, exactly? Or let’s say (TW: rape) some complete fuckwit of a husband wants pocket money and forces his wife to fuck men he brings home and they pay him for it - how does making sex work illegal stop that from happening? That is a case of misogyny intersecting with rape culture and abuse. Abolition by itself does not stop that from happening. It also increases the likelihood of police corruption.
So-called “rescue” organisations are increasingly being exposed as doing more harm than good because AGAIN they are not addressing WHY people are in the industry. Those reasons are intersectional with classism, racism, ableism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia. Also many of these orgs and charities are being exposed as fabricating their information.
The dominance of the privileged sex worker who chose her vocation and just loves doing it is a narrative that needs to be minimised. I understand it arose partly because it is important that the diversity of sex work be recognised, but because non-sex workers can never, ever view us as actual human beings, they just grasped onto it as the flip side to the grizzled, victimised street walking junkie (which non-sex workers have been exploiting in media with very little sensitivity or compassion for fucking decades), whilst not letting go of the junkie. Now all we get is one or the other, with the heiarchy very, very unmistakable, and sex workers ourselves feel the pressure of that impact onto us and what we say about our work as well.
But even those grizzled street walking junkies who’ve had pretty rough shit happen to them are often not abolitionists even as they may well fucking hate the job - they want their rights still, too. They are human beings, not walking testimonies.
I mean - I could tell some pretty amazing, really radical stories. But. They’re not my stories to tell. And I’m not okay doing that. I could tell some of my stories but while I’m open about the fact I’m a sex worker I do NOT go into detail about my past or present experiences publicly because of the way non-sex workers treat such information.
The main people I hold responsible for this hopeless, unhelpful dichotomy with no useful action being taken outside of what we’re doing for ourselves: Non-sex workers.
Cos you either want us to be your little tragedy porn puppets or your impossibly fantastic courtesan icons and you will never allow the full complexity of what we experience on tiered levels to be fully understood or comprehended or even allowed for. You insist that it be one or the other and within an oppressive framework many of us bend over backwards trying to meet that expectation under the belief it’ll somehow make things better for us. We HAVE to be victims so you can feel justified in pitying us and can make yourselves feel useful by ‘rescuing’ us and we HAVE to be liberated happy hookers so you can feel okay about watching porn and sending anonymous, invasive questions to any sex worker blogs you find online.
I don’t find feminist spaces at all useful to the rights of sex workers. Cos it always ends up as antis vs pros. It always ends up these feminists who say all sex work is rape up against those feminists who say porn is liberation. And both sides will have their token sex workers on hand to back them up when they snap their fingers.
I mean how many people who’ve liked this post or chimed in the discussion have actually been in sex worker only spaces?
Cos that’s where shit really happens. That’s where things GET DONE and get accomplished. When sex workers are left alone with each other to organise, advocate and basically just support each other.
That’s when the whole complicated, vast array of sex worker experience comes together and we talk about it and we share our stories, and we laugh and we cry and we hate on the world and celebrate each other - in all our messy, diverse glory - and then we plot the ways we can get our rights so maybe one day no sex worker has to fear being raped by the police, beaten or ripped off by a client or forced into it as a homeless teenager.
Frankly, I think feminists need to butt-out of trying to set our agenda for us. We’re actually totally, one hundred per cent capable of doing it ourselves, even when our experiences have been radically different and our opinions and perspectives on shit diverge completely. This paternalistic feminist interference has not been helpful, it just attempts to make sex workers mold our movement to suit whatever feminist agenda is butting in at the time, often with the consequences being the silenced voices of the actual sex workers.
In my experience, those who are anti-sex work tend to fall within the radical feminist school of thought, a movement marked for its transphobia, whorephobia and the promotion of the idea of false-consciousness (and don’t get on me for this - if it weren’t for these factors, I may have turned out to be a radical feminist. I’m not unsympathetic to everything they have to say).
But. I do NOT want the rights of sex workers fought for by the sex-positivity, pro-porn but non-sex working camp either.
Because sex work and sex workers rights is not a matter of a sexual revolution.
IT IS A MATTER OF LABOUR, INDUSTRIAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS.
First. Foremost. Most importantly. Without compromise.
The happy hooker stereotype really does nothing to aid such objectives.
But who do you think abolition - forcing sex work to go underground, practiced in illegality with all the breeding grounds for corruption and exploitative individuals such circumstances attract, making sex workers lives tradeable commodities - is going to hurt the most in the end?
I can tell you right now - with her education, options for other employment, secure roof over her head, cis and white privilege and conventional looks - it ain’t gonna be the middle class white sex worker by choice.
As always, it will be the most disenfranchised, the most oppressed and the least privileged who will suffer the most as a consequence of action taken on their behalf that does not truly comprehend and consider the complex issues they face.
But…I still didn’t say that. But I’ll bite:
Because at the end of the day, that word will float into meaningless oblivion for that white girl. It won’t matter someone said it. Having “whitey” hurled at you is essentially a word that conceptualizes all that is positive and privileged about life born as a white person. It’s a mark of anger and frustration at the unfairness and inequality in place because someone is white - the right and ability to be ignorant and not questioned by society for it! To walk around uneducated about the world, about how things got to be the way they are, and to retreat the moment it gets hard or difficult or tough!
To glide away from unpleasantness. Being a whitey means that stuff doesn’t stick to you, not even words about your race. Whitey will never have a home denied to them based on the fact that they are a whitey. Will never be vilified in the media as a potential terrorist, as the face of crime, will never be killed by a cop even when they aren’t doing anything, will never be murdered in cold blood when carrying home a back of skittles and iced tea. Whitey will never be less likely to get a job or an education or to make less money than literally anyone else. Whitey is the ultimate achievement in a game where achievements are nothing more than what color you were born as. Whitey will win, every time, every game, every way. Whitey can be saturated in the media that looks like them, every time, all the time, and still complain they have no culture - following it up with stealing others’ cultures for the novelty of it - like shoplifting from the oppressed. Whitey is safety and protection in your home, in your neighborhood, on the streets, and expecting the police to be on your side. Whitey is rarely the reason you get beaten to death, or hung, or burned. Whitey means rightness, means imperialism happening because of you not to you! Whitey means you history and your culture is the pinnacle of Civilization, the best of humanity and everyone else is called backwards, or wrong, or pitied. Whitey is safety. Whitey is doing more crimes - murder, rape, illegal drug use and possession - in American than ANY OTHER RACE and still being convicted for it at a lower rate than blacks or latinos. Whitey is the magic ability to step all over other people and get away with it, to have that be the norm and unquestioned.
Being called whitey means your feelings are hurt for about five minutes and then forgetting about it. Because in the end, being Whitey has never ever systematically stopped you from anything, has never hindered your life simply because you were white in the same way being a person of color dictates how your life is different than a white person’s.
Can you even really call that derogatory?
— rebloggable by request. They are insulting me quite splendidly in French, however, if you didn’t catch the irony of calling me tabarnac. It’s roughly like ‘fucking girl’ so in addition to all that, they’re a misogynist. beautiful.
“Crry exists of course, in our fairly simple sense, on the menus of Indian restaurants and in the bottles of curry powder to be found even in unpretentious U.S. grocery stores. But search though the shelves in an Indian kitchen, or grocery store, and you will find no bottles labeled ‘curry powder.’ What Indians buy or make are often called ‘masala’, different mixtures of ground spices used to season a variety of dishes.
[…]
So British curry powder is really a fabricated entity, the logic of colonial commerce imposing a term that signified a particular type of dish onto a specific mixture of spices, which then became a fixed and familiar product…”
-Uma Narayan, Disclocating Cultures
A lot of people I know need to realize this.
18/07/2012
Since being detained yesterday, Tuesday 17 July by the department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), Mr X continues to face roadblocks in accessing his family, legal team and support workers. SERCO staff at Maribyrnong IDC have repeatedly told Mr X that they are unable to fax vital documentation pertinent to his application for Ministerial Intervention to his legal team and support workers. Excuses given were that the multiple fax numbers he provided them were unavailable or not working.
Before fleeing to seek asylum in Australia, Mr X was detained incommunicado and tortured by Sri Lankan government forces in Sri Lanka. This history practically ensures that Mr X will be detained and tortured again by Sri Lankan police and/or government forces if he is deported back to Sri Lanka. As a result of this violence, Mr X has developed severe mental health issues and prior to being detained yesterday, was being treated by a psychologist in Melbourne.
While the UK has overturned deportation orders based on Sri Lanka’s history of detention and torture of those who have been returned to the country after failed asylum claims, Australia appears bent on handing torture survivors back to those who persecuted them in the first place. It is incumbent on DIAC to stop the deportation of Mr X based on Australia’s non-refoulement obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Chances are you are not a white man if you are reading this or taking it seriously. However, we encourage you to take it upon yourself to compel at least one abusive white activist man you know to read this. You know who he is /they are. Take this as a challenge, but if you can’t we understand. We wrote this list because we’ve been abused for so long by some white activist men, particularly in doing Indigenous solidarity work. This list is just a beginning. It does not capture all our critiques, but it’s a humble effort at creating that space where we could let it all out. Not that we haven’t confronted these particular white ‘radicals’, but, nothing happened. We remained as hysterical, hyper-sensitive white women and women of color.
You know you are a ***star*** white Indigenous solidarity activist if:
- You are the go-to-person when it comes to X Indigenous territory or nation(s).
- You have successfully managed to counsel people of colour out from Indigenous solidarity spaces and ‘back’ to the ‘ethnic’ enclaves you think they belong to.
- You have successfully managed to make women of colour struggling to do Indigenous solidarity work in ‘your’ group cry several times over your racist, heteropatriarchal hateful hysteria.
- You have taken Gandhi’s maxim of “see-no-evil-and-speak-no-evil” to mean the Marxist-see-no-race-and-no-gender maxim (which incidentally guides your life and politics…BTW, we are not saying we are a fan of that sexist and racist Gandhi).
- You do not let critical anti-colonial and anti-racist work by Indigenous peoples and people of colour convince you that it’s not all about class.
- You are just not smart enough to understand that capitalism emerged out of colonial and racist Empire building.
- You’ve organized your activism along all the problematic hierarchies in our society. You are, after all, a white Marxist man/Manarchist.
- You do not listen to Elders in the Indigenous communities you work with. Instead, you believe in making few who share your politics into the ‘go-to’ voices and pretend that Indigenous nations/communities are homogenous.
- You forget (or are just not smart enough to understand and recognize) that people of colour have much, much longer histories of fighting people like you for their liberation, than you have of trying to help out the very people you’ve done everything to destroy.
- You forget what your forefathers have done, and very easily ignore what you are doing. You have the big responsibility of being the messiah of Indigenous peoples, after all.
- You feel compelled to tell Indigenous people just exactly how they should do their decolonizing work (that is, through your hyper-patriarchal, see-no-race-and-no-gender Marxist/Manarchist politics).
- You frantically Marxist-bate in public, in front of Indigenous women and women of colour, and encourage them to join you.
- You think too much with your white cis-gendered dick!
- You feel comfortable to tell people of colour that their work is important only in so far as it does not come in the way of your white politics, and class-based strategies of doing anti-colonial work.
- You find anti-racism divisive. However, a little bit of culture thrown in (you know, flip flops from India, a bit of an accent) is heartily welcomed.
- You speak of class revolution with a silver spoon dangling from your “Marxist” mouth. Your Marxist mouth often stinks so much that sometimes others have to leave the room.
- You think people of colour, in particular, women of colour are just naïve and not capable of understanding the complexity of solidarity activism the way you do. Women of colour, after all, have the smallest skull size.
- You think you can’t be racist because you date only women of colour. You do not want to think about how such sexual politics have been central to colonial violence.
- Your knowledge of feminism is limited to your appreciation for the ‘First’ wave’s racists and eugenicists. Margaret Sanger is held by you in high esteem.
- You insist activism against colonialism should feel good for white bodies, and therefore you don’t want to focus on colonial violence that ALL white bodies participate in.
- You talk big macho shit about police, but fail to see the uniform of your own whiteness
- You ensure that only the projects you propose are well funded.
- You think (and have also said) that white people’s anti-colonial work is more important than that of anybody else’s. Even more important than that of the Indigenous peoples themselves!
- You speak with confidence about everything, and are never humbled by the limits of your knowledge. Your knowledge which sits within the confines of your Marxist-bating or your manarchism.
- You secretly roll your eyes at Indigenous spirituality, while you ‘politely’ encourage prayer at the beginning of your events
- You are not into all this divisive language: you know colonizer/colonized. You have also told us that bringing in gender, race, sexuality ‘etc’ negatively affects Indigenous solidarity work.
- You like to list all the ways you and your ancestors have been colonized. And how much slavery and servitude are alike.
- You talk about the newness of solidarity work, and how you are making history with your every effort, instead of looking back and acknowledging that you are flying on the coat-tails of the oldest resistance movement on this land.
- The sexual violence of colonialism is a niche-activist market for you, it doesn’t make up the core of your activism. The continued theft of Indigenous children and the ever growing number of disappeared and murdered Indigenous women are a footnote to your “solidarity” or “decolonization” politics. The theft of land apparently is not connected to the dispossession, disappearing and murdering of Indigenous peoples.
- For you increasing white men’s power on this land is how anti-colonialism is done
- You LOVE to smudge, and parade your Indigenous knowledge about, never feeling uncomfortable with your body having this knowledge
- You ensure that your political framework is the way to do “Indigenous solidarity”. So sure are you that this one political framework is the only way to decolonize, that you react with intense hostility, indifference or superficiality to any detected threat to your activist territory. Whether that “difference” to you is critical anti-racist analysis, critical disability analysis, or gender and Queer analysis, or any kind of non-secular analysis.
- Words fought against or for by any political-socio group (like women, for instance) is accorded the status of “academese”. These words (such as race, gender, patriarchy, heteropatriarchy, queerness, transgender, genderqueer, disability etc..) which allow for an analysis of interlocking systems of oppression are too complicated for the “regular” masses, and those who use this “politically correct language” are elitist
- You chalk-up anti-colonial/racist feminist politics to Foucault and afterwards make it into a debate between Marx and Foucault. You feel like women of color bringing up race needs you to pull out your Marx sword, so that you can intellectualize your racism and make it into a debate between two dead white men who cared as little about race and gender as you do.
- You speak about “less-educated” whites, or poor(er) whites as if they are not politically savvy, and can’t keep up with your “revolutionary” consciousness
- You relate to your colonizing ancestors as if they were less smart and more racist than you are.
- You dare to imagine what this land will look like after your revolutionary vision is achieved.
- You forget that sometimes colonized and racialized people make ‘friends’ because it’s politically expedient for survival, or maybe you remember, but you are never the politically expedient—you are always the (s)hero
- You participate in marches where you can feel like the white activists in Selma, Alabama, but you only participate in the marches.
- Being behind the barricades makes you giddy with excitement. You play revolution on the coat-tail of Indigenous peoples’ struggles, but once the barricades are down, you are nowhere to be seen.
- You have made a living/a career/ a name/an identity out of being “in solidarity”.
- You have made it clear that you are a shameless scumbag. You are immune to being shamed for your racism, (hetero)sexism etc.
- You judge poor(er) than you folks for their materialism. Sometimes dressing like a poor(er) person is less advisable for the poor—funny unlike you it doesn’t tend to give them activist credit.
- You pretend to know your Marx, but understand the working-class as “joe six-pack”—the sweaty-cis-gendered ,straight-as-a-gate-talking, game watching ‘abled bodied’ working man. (insert a burp here).
- You refer to (certain kinds of) racists and racism and colonialism as “mad”, or “crazy”. You make sure to distance yourself from their racism. “They,” after all, are the real racists, and being the good white is your bread and butter. You are always ready to pull out your one or two self-reflexive superficial utterances, usually made alongside a long story of narcissistic pleasure in your “eureka” moment-akin- to Columbus’ “ I discovered new land, ” and yours being “I discovered I am on stolen land” .
- You don’t recognize any objections to your policy, whether silent objections or those that are screamed (at you) by marginalized bodies in history and present.
- You push past the “slow” process of consensus. You bully your way so that your time-line and agenda is achieved
- You complain that this work is really hard and too complicated. Ending colonialism, after all, should be easy.
- Your notion of decolonization never calls into question your ‘rightful’ place on this land
- You secretly and mostly want decolonization to ‘unshackle’ yourself from the position of the colonizer….It is, after all, such a burden.
- via Unsettling Settlers
somebody will need ointment for their burn.
another not so fun fact about australia history- the complete and utter erasion of the Chinese, Indonesian, Filipino and Malay involvement in defending and fighting for Australia during the war. And even after assisting in said war efforts- these people would be deproted
btw you should look up the O’Keefe vs. Calwell case of 1948- it would kick start the demise of the white australia policy
also look up Annie O’keefe too
it’s funny how even in the 1950’s when Australia opened up to Southern European Immigrants, they implemented the “75% rule” where if you were from Greece or the type, you had to show your genealogy AND ON TOP OF THAT SHOW THAT AT LEAST 75% OF YOUR GENEALOGY WAS EUROPEAN AKA WHITE
another fun (not so fun) / confusing fact: PM Robert Menzies found another funny way of championing for an all white society aka the white australia policy and that was by capitalising on everyone’s fear of the expansion of communism across Asia aka letting in people from Vietnam and the type into the country, to “experience” Australia and essentially leave the country with a good impression and not thinking that the white supremacist policy was racist and there for going back to their own countries and happy ambassadors for the white australia policy i know it’s confusing right
Yes, look up the Columbo Plan.
Then they discovered that you can totally make fat stacks of cash out of these people and decided to find new and better ways to exploit migrants. I.e. “multiculturalism”.
(from Shira Lipkin’s The Changeling’s Lament:)
When I was little,
I asked my alleged mother,
what’s a girl?
She said
you,
you’re a girl,
and she laced me into dresses
(that I tore off in the school parking lot,
in line for the bus).
Laced me into ballet shoes
that left blisters
and bloodied my feet
until I had calluses.
Which she had filed off,
beauticians pinning me down,
because it’s not beauty
if you don’t bleed.So a while ago Shira Lipkin’s poem “the changeling’s lament”, from the September 2011 (Mythic) issue of Stone Telling, went viral online. It gained a mind-boggling number of hits. The poem is based in Shira’s experience as a genderqueer person, but it hit a nerve for cis women as well; and one of the comments we got about it as a queer poem was “well, but all girls feel that way.”
My brain’s been poking at that comment ever since; it’s problematic because it was erasing/failing to comprehend gq experience, but I feel it’s also important in that it highlights a common aspect of cis femininity: so often even to cis women, femininity isn’t a comfortable/well-fitting category. It’s imposed from outside, and so much of it is based on harmful patriarchal notions.
At the time I said “Sure, but it’s not the same, because Shira isn’t just/always a girl.”
Because, baseline: If a category doesn’t fit, you can a) exist uncomfortably with the label, b) reject the label, or c) change the category. And while a lot of cis women go for (c), because traditional constructions of femininity so often SUCK, and that work is important — that doesn’t mean (b) matters less. For some of us the label, the whole category, is just wrong no matter how you change it.
And I’m comfortable making that argument for other people. But. For myself? Eh for me it’s not that simple either. I exist between cultures - I have to ask which femininity, which culture’s girl, woman, other, which categories. And my between-cultures experience has always been marginal - I’m accepted into any given culture on sufferance. I’m not a “real” Indian to a lot of people, including plenty of family members, but nobody will mention it unless I’m “difficult”. So what happens if I try to change their category of femininityorreject it? “Shee so Western Shweta.”
And there goes any validity anything I say might have.
And IDEK, how do I coexist with western categories and cultural patterns without embracing whiteness? When I try to speak out about that - again, we’re talking with family, close family friends, etc, my life offline - I get marked as the outsider, the person who isn’t really American or British, and again, any comment I make is invalidated.
The cis women I’ve spoken to about this have told me I can claim-and-change femininity, and just feeling alienated by the category doesn’t mean I’m genderqueer. Because, y’know, all girls feel that way. But how could I claim either/any of these femininities enough to change them? To me they’re a language not my own, one I learned to speak because I had to, and now it comes to my tongue more easily than anything else and any language I could call my own is made mostly of silences.
(Nor is English mine, though I think in it; it is a language of necessity, and it never gives me the joy that even a stumbling sentence in Tamil makes me feel. And there again is a problem with the word, whether the word is woman or genderqueer or genderfluid or all of them, they’re all English, all Western-centric, all relative to only some of the femininities I’m juggling.)
I’ve been doing (a), uncomfortable silent existence, all my life. Because it’s just one of the things I gave up for safer existence on the margins. And, well, I can manage “woman”, it’s not that uncomfortable for me, some days I barely even notice the hat doesn’t fit. So I’m left, still with two questions. Is it worth rejecting the label & dealing with added marginalizations? And, is it even accurate to reject the label if the reason I feel I can’t change the categories isculturaloutsider status rather thangenderoutsider status?
It has taken me ten months to ask the questions. I’m not so worried about answers, but more - are they even the right questions?
Hearts, hearts and hugs Shweta. Agree with everything here. Most times, arguments like these have no bone when put in context. If we are to go with the idea that “all girls feel that way”, the question at the end of the day is — whose LIFE CHANCES are at risk (rejecting or accepting the label of genderqueer/genderfluid/trans* etc), and which girls get to not have structural ramifications for their confusion and feelings of unease?
Reading this post took me back to an e-mail a humjinsi friend sent me little over a year ago (pasting bits of it here with permission). This is more to do with option (a), but figure this needs to go out there. This e-mail came at a point when I was almost ready to quit academic feminism last year, it was a response to me wanting to give up the label of feminism.
Please don’t think I don’t get it, I do. I know feminism and the women’s movement is a toxic nest right now. R* told me what happened at [field] and I agree, it wasn’t handled well. They had no business sanitising the abuse from the testimonies. Want you to know I’m on your side, and will be more than happy to help in any way you want. But, if you want my honest opinion, not ID-ing as feminist isn’t going to change anything. IDing as humjinsi instead of “trans” doesn’t change problems. I feel comfortable with the term, and horridly discounted when seen as a “trans man”, but it’s a decision I had to make, not out of choice. Working with [organisation], the most repeated phrases are “But all of us are frustrated in our movements! You can’t give up! You have to fight for your group”. Problem is, not all of us can question our groups, for starters. Secondly, how many of us have to pay with our lives for even asking or prodding the questions. I don’t even get the “But we all have similar problems in our movements” logic, you know? Just the fact that we’re in different subject positions, means there are going to be different words for our lives, one would think…Leaving and keeping labels works when your life doesn’t have a direct co-relation with what you keep or drop. When you have the time, do think why do you want to not ID as feminist anymore, in your academics or even by politics. I’m still absolutely on your side, just think about the whys and hows you could arrive at a choice to disassociate from a movement (or a body, or a gender if we’re looking at the SHITFAIL M* did) and know that most of us who move away don’t have a choice. Wish I could tell M* how we don’t have “similar problems at all”.
