Reclaim the Night, autism, gender and perceptions of danger

So i went to the Reclaim the Night march in Manchester last weekend, while up there meeting up with several other disability activists (dammit, why do ALL the awesome queer/crip/trans/feminist/anarchist intersections have to be in Manchester?), and it got me thinking about perception of places/spaces as "safe" or "dangerous", and how that's influenced by gender, disability, neurology and other factors...

(Side note #1: I won't make this post primarily about the politics of Reclaim the Night, but i was very pleased by the politics of this one, after the very ugly controversies around transphobia, gender essentialism and anti-sex-worker bigotry at previous ones. This one was explicitly made open to all genders, and while women (or female-appearing people) were certainly the majority (as expected), i was certainly very far from the only male-appearing person, and trans and genderqueer people were very much in evidence as being at the centre of the organisation of the march, which is definitely a hugely positive development, as was one of the headline speakers at the post-march rally being from the English Collective of Prostitutes (among the others were 2 from Women Asylum Seekers Together, and the intersections of sexism, racism, transphobia, etc were IMO extremely well drawn - disablism being the only really notable omission... but at least i was there in my DAN T-shirt, and at least one of the main organisers of the march was a disabled woman). There were some performance poets whose rather essentialist second-wave feminism was in evidence, and there were clearly unresolved contradictions, but the overall movement was definitely in a positive direction. The friends who i was up there to see had decided not to go to the march because of how put off they were by the transphobic and anti-sex-worker goings-on of the previous Reclaim the Night North events, but were very pleased at my report from this one...)

I had been expecting (or perhaps "assuming" is better, as there wasn't really anything for the expectation to be based on) that the march route would be going through Manchester city centre - seeing that as obvious both from a point of view of public visibility and from a point of view of targeting patriarchal culture and locations of sexual violence - so, when the march left the students' union (most of the main organisers were students at the University of Manchester, which is just outside the city centre) and went through back streets and a park, i wasn't too surprised, because of course that made sense, but when it got back to the university and it was obvious that that was where it was ending, i was somewhat disappointed, not to say shocked (in fact, i went off on a bit of a rant to an activist friend i hadn't seen in ages who saw me at the end, possibly freaking him out a bit...)

A friend i chatted to afterwards pointed out that the reason for the march going through obscurer, less visible areas was "because those spaces are dangerous because they're not very populated" - which i think could do with a bit of unpacking...

To me, the concept of somewhere being "more dangerous" because "less populated" is extremely counter-intuitive - danger of assault, rape, robbery, etc comes from people, therefore, to me, it logically increases in direct proportion to the numbers of people in an area. Now, the obvious rejoinder to that is that people who commit violent crimes don't do so in public places where their actions are easily visible - as, for instance, was pointed out to me many times as a child by my parents while expressing concern about me walking home from school by obscure public footpaths instead of main roads... disregarding, or failing to understand completely, that i felt far safer in obscure and unpopulated places, and the times that i was assaulted or robbed on the way home from school were all on the routes that most pupils took (and by other pupils, either from my school or other schools).

Much later, at university, i was often met by disbelief from other students when i said i preferred to walk home alone from other people's houses late at night than to get taxis - and a common response from female students when i said i felt safer walking alone was "you're not a woman". My usual response to that was two statistics - that the demographic at highest risk of being assaulted in public places at night is actually men between the ages of 18 and 24, and that women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted by a taxi driver in a taxi than by a stranger while walking alone, and far more likely to be sexually assaulted in their own homes than either. (Several people flat out refused to believe these.)

Of course, the point that i was missing at the time was socialisation - something that, due to my own lack of it, i was pretty fucking ignorant of in almost all contexts, and still isn't "instinctive" for me to recognise the existence of. Regardless of the actual likelihood of a particular danger happening, it's the perception of it that actually matters in terms of how people deal with it - and the perception of the danger of assault, particularly sexual assault, is heavily influenced by patriarchal cultural norms. It's extremely difficult for anyone who hasn't actually experienced that socialisation (including myself) to fully understand the ways in which women are socialised from childhood to believe that going out alone is unsafe, that the outside world in general is an unsafe place for women to be without male protection - and that, conversely, "the home" is a safe place for women - despite the vast majority of sexual violence happening within the home.

One of the main points of Reclaim the Night is to counter these false perceptions - although, IMO, that isn't always made clear enough, as one friend commented that ze thought the concept of needing to "reclaim" outside spaces at night could actually reinforce the perception of being outside at night being dangerous for women - seeing it as a movement to "reclaim the night" from actual danger - whereas my take on it was pretty much the exact opposite of that. (I suspect both perspectives were present - certainly some of the chants and displayed slogans on the march could be interpreted either way...)

This got me thinking about... odd (and quite difficult to explain) intersections of neurology, socialisation and privilege. My attitude to walking home alone at night could very easily be attributed purely to male privilege - yet, while i am in no way attempting to deny that i have male privilege - despite being genderqueer, i look male, and therefore have (at least some forms of) male privilege whether i like it or not - i think it's actually somewhat more complex than that...

As a very, very socially isolated child with no real comprehension of gender norms at all, and no perception of myself as either a sexual or a gendered being, i don't think that what i got could be accurately described as "male socialisation" (and what "male" socialisation i was aware of, i resisted with great stubbornness) - in many ways, the assumptions about life that i developed in my teenage years were (somewhat, though probably not much) closer to typical female ones (and i did in fact seriously consider the possibility that i might be a trans woman when i was around 13 or 14, tho i fairly quickly realised that wasn't the case when i realised i didn't feel any dysphoria about, or overwhelming need to modify, my actual body). While not wanting to appropriate anyone else's experience, i very tentatively think that this is a parallel experience of many trans people (both men and women) who feel strongly that, even though they were "brought up as" their birth sex, they actually experienced more of the socialisation typical to the gender they identified as.

Also, as a child and teenager regarded as "naive" and "vulnerable" and constantly "worried about" in very negative ways by my parents, i was heavily overprotected and discouraged from doing anything independently (while being put in a "double bind" of simultaneously being berated for not having a social life like "normal" children), and had the threat of kidnapping and/or sexual abuse drummed into me at every possible occasion. Yet, i didn't care about that threat - for one thing, i was unconvinced that anything an adult could do to me could be worse than what was done to me on a daily basis by other children, for another, sex and sexuality were pure abstractions to me that had nothing to do with my daily life and no emotional significance for me at all... but, perhaps most importantly, i simply was not capable of caring about physical danger to myself. Physical pain, yes; but the mere threat or likelihood of something happening to me did not interest me at all until and unless it actually happened to me.

This, i am fairly certain, was not a "male thing" but an "autistic thing" - as i have met several other autistic (or otherwise developmentally disabled) people, both male and female, for whom perception of (and/or ability to care about) danger was similarly altered or absent. (This, i think, is one of the things that often gets autistic people seen as "naive", and therefore in need of paternalistic protection due to our own "ignorance", when in actual fact the autistic person may be just as aware of a threat as any neurotypical person, but just react differently to it, and thus be percieved as not acknowledging it - i remember describing myself as "wilfully naive" in an attempt to explain that.) However, it's easy to see how such an attitude on the behalf of an autistic person could very easily (and even rightfully) be percieved as indicative of privilege by others - in fact (although this deserves its own post), it's one of the reasons why i actually think some autistic people sometimes have privilege over neurotypical people of the same gender and/or socioeconomic background...

(Yes, this is extremely controversial. Yes, i will (hopefully) be coming back to it...)

(Side note #2: Part of me wonders if this is one thing that contributes to the theory held by people like Simon Baron-Cohen that autism is an "extreme male brain" - that autistic behaviour, regardless of the gender of the autistic person, and whether due purely to neurology or also to (lack of) socialisation, actually mimics male privilege...)

(Side note #3: It's interesting that "perception of the risk of physical danger" is one of the "capacities" listed in the UK's Disability Discrimination Act as justifying the definition of a condition as "disabling" if they are affected by it - therefore, lack of perception of a risk of physical danger can, depending on the circumstances, be regarded either as disability or as privilege...)

Another thing that this brings to the forefront is the potential ambiguity of what a Reclaim the Night march is actually for - or, perhaps more accurately, who it's for (not the question of whether it's "for" women or people of all genders, but another sense of "for"... oh, how i love linguistic ambiguities ;) )... is its primary purpose for the empowerment of the actual marchers (in which case, going through the kind of areas which the majority of women or of oppressed people are made by society to feel unsafe in makes the most sense), or is it to be a public demonstration (in which case, going through very public areas like the city centre would make most sense)? My perception was very much that it was (or should have been) the latter (I almost certainly wouldn't have come from another city to a march which was purely intended to empower the people going on it - particularly as i already feel perfectly safe walking through unpopulated areas at night... in fact, far safer than i do walking through crowded city centres during the day) - but maybe others there saw it primarily as the former? Or, of course (and probably most likely), there were elements of both - with the possible tensions or contradictions between them perhaps percieved, perhaps not percieved.

(and even if the experience of the march is empowering for those on it, does that empowerment last or transfer over to situations other than the march? - as i overheard one fellow marcher say... "of course I feel safe walking through a deserted park at night when i'm with a hundred or so people carrying torches!")

So... yeah. I am still somewhat undecided as to how effective, either as public protest or as empowerment, Reclaim the Night actually is. I certainly have a more positive view of it than quite a few people i know (including several who identify as feminists), but i also think many, if not all, of those people's criticisms of it are very valid. One point, coming from a friend who decided not to go, which i think was particularly valid is the point that it is not only women who are told not to go out after dark alone, or who are commonly regarded as, if not actually to blame, then at least foolish or "irresponsible" if they are assaulted, raped, robbed or murdered while out after dark alone - a wide variety of oppressed and marginalised groups of people, including (but almost certainly not limited to) trans people of all genders, disabled people of all genders, and members of any minority (ethnic, linguistic, sexual, whatever) in areas where prejudice-motivated violence against that particular minority is common or well-documented, are subjected to the same patterns (with subtle variations) of victim-blaming and cultivation of a culture of fear (I actually think this is particularly heavy for disabled people who are either dependent on assistance from others to go out "alone", or who are regarded as requiring such assistance even if they are not, and who are subject to extremely paternalistic paradigms of assistance and "supervision"... and here, again, i link the Stay Up Late campaign) - and therefore, i think that, to avoid falling into the gender-essentialist trap of regarding gender-based oppression (regardless of whether or not it is historically prior to other forms of oppression... on which question i'm agnostic) as primary to all other oppressions in such a way that it's treated as the only oppression worth engaging with (and thus alienating everyone who is on the receiving end of any other type of oppression), Reclaim the Night as a movement needs to recognise that it is not only misogyny that the night needs reclaiming from.

I'm sure that there were other directions i was going to take this post when i started it. (It wasn't even meant to be a particularly long post...) Anyway, i guess i'll have to get back to them...

Disability and/in Music: recent roundup

I've come across or been given links to quite a few things about disability and music recently. This is more of a roundup of what i've recently encountered than a proper analytical post on the issue, but i do intend to do the latter at some point soon.

Firstly via FRIDA i found this post at Racialicious, about international disability music from Zimbabwe and from the Arab world, and a bit of analysis of what constitutes "disability music" as well. (I'm not quite sure if i like that phrase "disability music" - to me it sort of feels like it implies that disability is all the music is about, or that it exists in total isolation from the rest of the music world. The interplay between "disability arts" and the "mainstream" art world is always a tricky one in all art forms, which i sort of meant to, but didn't really, touch on in this post... i probably will at some point tho, just not now, so i'd appreciate any thoughts on it, especially from people who are in any way directly involved in the "disability arts movement"...)

(The website of the Zimbabwean band Liyana, linked to in the Racialicious post, doesn't seem to load for me - i don't know if it does for anyone else...)

The Arabic music video, Difference is Normal (which has English subtitles), is part of the Sprout Film Festival, which is a US-based festival of short films by and/or about people with "developmental disabilities" (which i believe translates roughly to UK terminology as "learning disabilities", tho i'm not sure if the categories are identical; i don't actually know whether autism is included within the umbrella of "developmental disabilities", or what if any difference there is in US terminology between "developmental disability" and "developmental disorder", for example), which looks like it includes some really awesome stuff, tho i haven't had the time to watch very much of it. They have a YouTube channel here.

Also with regard to international music, i recently discovered Poor Magazine, one of the contributors to which is "Krip Hop" artist Leroy Moore (whose stuff i haven't yet managed to hear any of), who has interviewed and/or written about many international disabled musicians, including the late disabled Kenyan reggae artist Mighty King Kong and The South African Disabled Musicians Association.

(As an aside, i'm incredibly excited by Poor Magazine, and really wish there was a UK equivalent to it - it covers just about all issues relating to poor, oppressed and marginalised peoples in the US, including racial and sexual minorities as well as disabled people and... just check it out, it's awesome...)

Leroy Moore also has an interview with the UK disabled punk band Heavy Load. The BBC has just shown a brilliant hour-long documentary about Heavy Load as part of their Storyville series, which is available to watch on BBC iPlayer until Monday 6th April 2009 (at least if you're in the UK - i don't know if people outside the UK can watch it or not). I could go on for ages about the documentary, but i'll just say now that it's absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in disability and/in music, and unflinchingly shows all sides of the story, including some of the contradictions within a band made up of disabled and non-disabled musicians which has its roots in an essentially paternalistic "disability services" environment (a housing association), yet which aims to transcend and overturn that (although, TBH, i'm not entirely sure how many non-disabled people watching would "get it" about those aspects... to me they're pretty clear and very well shown, anyway...)

There's one scene in particular, near the beginning of the documentary, when Heavy Load play their first gig for a "mainstream" audience, in a "normal" suburban pub, without having announced that they were a band mostly made up of disabled people, which made me think "this must have been what punk was like when it first appeared" - the "normal"-looking, culturally mainstream, non-disabled audience starting out with serious "what the fuck???" expressions on their faces as Heavy Load break out with a chaotic thrash-punk version of the Batman theme tune, and end up cheering with massive (and, seemingly to me anyway, genuine rather than patronising) enthusiasm - truly revolutionary culture shock.

(It's also amusing to see the ubiquitous Mat Fraser popping up announcing the band at a gig - i don't think there's anything to do with disability and the arts happening in the UK that he's not involved in...)

Heavy Load are also the founders of the Stay Up Late campaign (inspired by the title of one of their songs), which, IMO, is an absolutely fucking brilliant idea - after being pissed off by the number of disabled people who had to leave their gigs early due to inflexible support provision (meaning they had to go home when their support workers' shifts ended), they started a campaign to end this paternalistic discrimination and give people who need support to go out the right to have such support at any time they want.

There's another interview with Heavy Load here from the BBC's Ouch! podcast (hosted by... guess who), and Heavy Load also have their own website, and a Myspace page where you can hear some of their tracks, including "Stay Up Late".

(It's worth noting that searching for "Heavy Load" on YouTube also brings up several other results, including a rather awful 80s epic-fantasy-themed metal band with the same name and two reggae songs... yes, there is practically everything on YouTube...)

The film about Heavy Load is subtitled "a movie about happiness", and in the intro narration, filmmaker Jerry Rothwell states: "The first thing I noticed about Heavy Load was that they seemed to have found the secret of happiness; everything they did together brought them joy." While the truth of this statement seems to be borne out by the film (and also challenged/subverted by it, as the film doesn't shy away from the tensions and unhappiness within the band), it does remind me of the very dodgy stereotype of learning-disabled people as somehow inherently happier than those with "normal" cognition, or as having some sort of existential secret for non-disabled people to learn from them (this shades into the "angel on a mission to make society nicer" stereotype, and tends not to be so much associated with people on the autistic spectrum, but to be particularly associated with people with Down's syndrome (which Heavy Load's drummer, Michael White, has); i've sort of touched on the constracting characterisations of people with Down's and autistic people before, but i do intend to address it in greater detail in a forthcoming post).

This reminded me of the song "Mongoloid" by 80s art-punks Devo, a song i've always had profoundly ambiguous feelings about. (I've recently been listening to a bit of Devo through finding most of the classic post-punk documentary "Urgh! A Music War" - which features several other bands i love, such as The Au Pairs and Steel Pulse on YouTube.) The song is named after a former term for people with Down's syndrome (actually the term first used by John Langdon Down, the "discoverer" of the syndrome whose eponym is now used instead), which is now considered offensively both disablist and racist, and starts with the lyrics:

Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
Happier than you and me
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
And it determined what he could see

I'm really not sure whether to regard this song as offensive or as something that should be "reclaimed" as a disability anthem; on the one hand, it describes the "mongoloid" living a "normal", successful life in mainstream society and "no one even cared" about his "one chromosome too many", sending an arguably positive message; on the other, it also smacks strongly of disabled people being "Othered" by non-disabled artists for their own purposes, and of course uses the disablist, racist word as its title and chorus.

There are plenty of other songs by non-disabled musicians using disablist language that i have no problem at all with reclaiming and regarding as (albeit unintentional) disability anthems (examples like Prince Buster's classic ska tune "Madness" and the equally classic jungle tune "Original Nuttah" come to mind), but there is a layer of unease with "Mongoloid" for me that there isn't for them. Perhaps it's the racist as well as disablist dimensions to the word, perhaps it's that there's a stronger feeling of "Othering" from a non-disabled viewpoint in it; i'm not entirely sure.

(It is interesting to compare Devo's concept of "de-evolution" - the theme that humankind was supposedly degenerating intellectually in a "reverse" process of evolution - to Langdon Down's concept of the "ethnic classification of idiots", based on the Victorian racist idea that mentally disabled people were "regressions" to earlier evolutionary stages of humanity, namely the non-white races - whether the song was directly inspired by that idea, i don't know, but it's possible. "Mongoloid" was originally the B-side to "Jocko Homo", aka "Are We Not Men?", which was inspired by H.G. Wells's "The Island of Dr Moreau", a book which explored similar themes of evolution and colonial racism, and which i think also has a lot of, mostly-unintentional, disability resonance. I'll get around to posting about that some time...)

Anyway, thoughts both particularly on that song and on reclaiming pop-culture uses of disablist language in general would be much appreciated. (I would love to hear exactly what Michael White thinks of it, if he's heard it...)

And there i went into an analytical post anyway, even if not the one i intended to...

(The lack of recent posting has been largely due to what winter does to me, physically and mentally, combined with being pretty busy at the moment meaning i've had to divert spoons from blogging to other things. I'm still pretty busy, and going to be for the next month or so, but hopefully will have, if not more free time, a bit more energy if/when the weather improves. A more detailed description of the effects winter has on my mental processes may be my next post...)