Some good posts on anarchism/libertarianism that i have found recently:
Polycentric Order: Resolving Anarchist Conflict
Conflict between the socialist oriented and market oriented camps within anarchism can get very tedious. Many anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists appear to emphatically claim that market anarchism isn't truly anarchism, that opposition to private property and capitalism is a requirement for one to be an anarchist, conflate currently existing political and economic systems with a free market and sometimes even defend welfare states as if take the edges off of the alleged evils of capitalism. Some anarcho-capitalists appear to get baited into functioning as vulgar libertarians or they generally associate themselves too closely with contemporary conservatism and therefore end up defending currently existing corporatism as if it is the result of a free market, claim that all forms of socialism are statist political systems, defend paleoconservative positions on issues such as immigration and romantisize feudalism and colonial America...
I am really pleased (coming more from the anarcho-communist side myself) that someone coming from the "market anarchist" side of things has said "it is of course true that non-state institutions may sometimes qualify as examples of rulership."
Ze also makes a good distinction regarding "private property":
Market anarchists tend to define private property in terms that should actually appeal to a socialist, which is that legitimate private property is the product of labor - a labor theory of property aquisition. How can a socialist oppose labor when that is supposed to be their forte? If consistant to their principles, the market anarchist does not support all legal private property titles, for they have an independant standard of justice in property aquisition that would delegitimize currently existing conditions. In short, they oppose the currently existing legal construct. The vulgar libertarian, however, does fall into the trap of defending all or some illegitimate portion of currently existing private property titles and buisiness arrangements.
I think there would be a lot less shitty argument going on between "market" and "socialist" anarchists if this was more widely understood. (Of course, part of the problem is people who are really more accurately described as "vulgar libertarians" calling themselves "market anarchists".)
Perpetual use is an absurd criteria for ownership, for it would imply that as soon as one parks their car somewhere then it is no longer theirs and therefore someone else may expropriate the car for themselves. In short, it would justify theft.
I have to disagree somewhat with this bit, as i don't think any anarcho-communist believes in a standard of perpetual use. (This is similar to Mike's comment on my last post, where he says "Carried to its extreme conclusion, it seems we would have to admit that the hotel guest gains indefinite title to his room immediately upon check-in, and should never be evicted even if he doesn't pay the lodging fee.") I think nearly everyone would recognise that a hotel is something different from a home that one permanently lives in, and that "perpetual use" is unrealistic - but i think that a condition of general use, as brought up a couple of paragraphs down, is realistic as a criterion for rightful ownership: a house that someone lives in for 10 months out of a year is, IMO, rightfully owned by a person, but a house that someone lives in 4 months of the year isn't. (I'm reminded of the ridiculous argument often used against squatters that "they could move into your house while you are on holiday".) Similarly, if someone "owns" a whole fleet of cars that they never use, but just keep in their front garden as a symbol of how ostentatiously rich they are, then i think "stealing" one would be fully justified, if you really needed a car to get somewhere, and couldn't afford one - but stealing a car that was just parked outside someone's house, but that was their only car and they used it every day to take the kids to school definitely wouldn't be justified...
An interesting cunundrum to present a social anarchist with is, "I want to be a wage slave, I want to work for a boss, so what do you do if I truly do choose to enter into a contractual relationship with someone for wages in exchange for my labor? Why can't I rent out the products of my labor if I sincerely want to? What if I want to opt out of the worker's collective and look for an employer?". If an individual is truly autonamous, then noone may legitimately force them out of this personal association or force them to remain in a particular association, whether it is a single individual or "the majority" or "community".
I think i still have to think a bit more about this, but i think i have to agree with it - largely, in fact, because of how much it reminds me of the radfem-versus-sex-pos arguments about BDSM relationships - which, while some of which are (arguably) IMO problematic in terms of power relations, i would unhesitatingly defend the right of people to engage in (as long as, it should go without saying, everyone is consenting). I have to take the same stance on non-sexual interpersonal relationships as i do on sexual ones...
Anarcho at Anarchist Writers: Quoting Marxo-capitalists out of context?
I haven't read Rothbard, but this is still a nice deconstruction of the "anarcho-capitalist" position.
"Even worse, the possibility that private property can result in worse violations of individual freedom (at least of workers) than the state of its citizens was implicitly acknowledged by Rothbard. He uses as a hypothetical example a country whose King is threatened by a rising “libertarian” movement. The King responses by “employ[ing] a cunning stratagem,” namely he “proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the ‘ownership’ of himself and his relatives.” Rather than taxes, his subjects now pay rent and he can “regulate to regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on” his property as he sees fit."
Shagya Blog: More On Those Pesky Social Services
This post pretty much sums up my ambiguous feelings on the "welfare state":
The reason why social anarchists assert the need for positive freedoms is that in the real world we can't wait around until the perfect stateless – and therefore classless - society comes into being. In the real world people have needs and these must be met, if they cannot be not through mutual aid due through state-enforced economic inequality, then through government. To destroy social welfare – as well as protective legislation like the 8 hour day, or vacation time – and leave the rest of the state – and therefore class society with all its vast inequalities intact is to condemn the vast majority of the people to Third World misery.
(although i would query the bit about "protective legislation"... but i think that's for another post...)
It also needs to be pointed out that even in an anarchist society a significant minority of the population will have to be subsidized or supported in some manner think of the aged, sick, those with mental health problems etc. In a free society – and therefore one without the present vast inequality of wealth, and the resulting culture of narcissism and sociopathology – this could be done by mutual aid. In the meantime, and I have been discussing this for years, we can work to democratize, mutualize (de-state) existing social welfare measures. For example, Unemployment insurance should be run not by the state but be set up as a cooperative along the lines of a credit union. All workers become members of this coop and elect a board of directors for their city or region. Hospitals should be taken back by the community and run by elected boards representing the user population and the work force etc.
This is really heartening to read as well - and reminds me that i really, really need to fully write up my thoughts on the employer/employee relationship inherent in the current independent living movement model of personal assistance (which i am now actually living on the PA side... more on that in future posts), and how that can be squared with an anarchist philosophy... not so sure about the "unemployment insurance" bit, but the idea of democratising hospitals... wow. That would certainly stop shit like this (or this, or this, etc, etc, etc) happening...
And Werner in the comments saying that "vulgar libertarians" "mirror certain Marxist delusions"... hell yes - how many times does it need to be reiterated that the whole equating "socialism" with state authority and equating "liberty" with capitalism thing that both groups do almost as a matter of pseudo-religious dogma is complete bollocks...
Ok, this one is from 2 years ago, and from a blogger who seemingly hasn't posted since December 2006, but it's still very much worth reading, on the same subject:
Lady Aster: libertarianism: the music of a people who will not be slaves again?
(I'm not sure if this is the same Aster who used to comment, but recently stopped due to an argument about abortion rights, on Charles Johnson's Rad Geek blog... if Aster sees this, i'd like to say to her that i always liked and admired what she had to say there...)
I know plenty of people dependent in one way or another on the state. None of them like the system, and most resent its control over and its indifference to their lives. They support the system, tepidly, because they know of no other practical alternative- and because they know the Republicans who represent the 'free market' in their eyes would gladly leave them to die. Some of them take benefits from the system more or less for granted, true. But this is because because they've given up hope functioning as individuals, and this is turn is usually only because various systems of oppression (statism included) have painted them into a psychic and economic corner.
...
Protest first not wealth transfers but the controls the welfare state enforces on people. Libertarians should rise in anger when government largesse is used to control peoples' lives or serf-farm them out to corporations as 'workfare'. Don't tell the poor that they are lazy if they don't want to work in humiliating jobs at starvation wages- show how our crony capitalist system is at fault for offering them nothing but humiliation and starvation wages. Show how the spirit of liberty is the same spirit which could empower them against everyone who wants to run their lives- whether that be the state, corporate bosses, welfare bureaucrats, criminal gangs, or abusive parents and husbands.
Don't act like the poor are your natural enemies and the rich are your natural friends. Don't act like corporatism, rife with privilege and racism, in equivalent to your ideal. Don't act like the middle class or 'productive citizens' are better than the poor, are your first priority, or retain their positions because of merit or special virtue in a state capitalist world where the real mechanism of a free market has marginal play. Talk to people. Invite them your meetings. Reach out and understand their concerns and show that libertarianism will help them, not how morality shows that they should help you.
...
Extend your notion of liberty to something more than formal noncoercion. When someone speaks of the tyranny of their boss or workplace, don't tell them the relationship is 'voluntary' and thus the tyranny isn't real- tell them instead how statism makes possible social and economic relations that always feel like heirarchy and tyranny. If you don't feel this, maybe you need to learn to rebel against the boss yourslef. And it just might be the reason you don't feel this, and they do, is because you are bribed well for your corporate serfdom and they are bribed poorly. In which case it is your love of freedom for its own sake that has been dampened, and theirs which still flares. In a certain sense a poor person who reaches for the state to fight corporate tyranny deeply resented is more libertarian than the libertarian with perfect theory who meekly submits to the 'just' control of bosses micromanaging their lives.
(I'm not sure that i agree with some of the more market-oriented bits in between those 3 quotes, like the bit about "how life would be if they could start their own businesses", which i think is a bit ambiguous - does it mean start non-hierarchical co-ops, which i would thoroughly approve of, or become entrepreneurs within the capitalist framework, which i wouldn't? - but, if market-oriented libertarians generally followed this post's advice, i certainly wouldn't be anywhere near so frustrated and pissed off with them... and they might have something meaningful to offer the disability rights movement...)
Lady Aster also has a really good post on the same site about sex-positive feminism and libertarianism...
OK, that got to be a bit more than just link-and-quote. Never mind...
Edit to add: apparently, this is my 100th post. Woot. I hadn't thought that it would take me over a year to reach 100 posts, but so it goes... i was interrupted by a lot of stuff. (And it's fucking weird that i've had this blog for over a year... i somehow missed the anniversary of it, too...) Maybe my goal should be to reach 200 by the end of 2008...
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
My Libertarian Ethics
I am writing this because I realised it would be relevant to several of the posts I am currently planning to write, and it would make it somewhat easier to write them if, instead of explaining basically the same ethical position in each one, I could just link back to this...
Libertarianism is my most basic and fundamental ethical and political principle - it is what underlies pretty much all my other principles. I am an anti-capitalist, a feminist, a believer in the social model of disability (there needs to be a snappy word for that - social-modellist?), etc., because I am a libertarian, and not vice versa.
Unfortunately, the word “libertarianism”, particularly in English-speaking countries, has been grossly distorted in meaning in its commonest usages - hence my need to explain here what it means to me...
“Libertarianism” has seemingly come to mean a sort of amoral, social-Darwinist style of extreme free-market capitalism, based around a belief that “free trade” (something which I actually believe is an oxymoron, at least when using the word “trade” as it is generally used in an economic context) is the only ethically acceptable way to run an economy. However, this isn't the word's original meaning - according to Wikipedia, the term was coined by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, although other sources say it was first used by Proudhon himself. At any rate, the original (and still mostly current in Europe) usage of the term as a self-description was by anti-capitalists, and the “default” libertarian position was and is the one which needs a qualifier as “left-libertarian” or “libertarian communist/socialist” in the UK and US.
Libertarianism, as far as I am concerned, means a political philosophy which holds freedom from coercion as its primary value, the value which all other values derive from. Thus, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be a feminist, because all of the key feminist issues, as far as I can tell, revolve around women lacking and deserving the freedom to control their own lives and their own bodies, and fighting for liberation from a restrictive system of patriarchal family and relationship structures and gender roles. Similarly, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be an anti-capitalist, because capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty - as exchange-value, the most fundamental component of capitalist economics, needs some form of authority to define and regulate it, and the capitalist wage-labour system could not exist without coercion (at least in its negative form of threats, e.g. of poverty for not working). (I will expand on this particular topic in a future post, because it's hugely controversial to say the least, and I think it deserves a post to itself.)
As Wikipedia notes, “Libertarian is an antonym of authoritarian” - i.e., it is not, despite the popular understanding in the English-speaking world, an antonym of “socialist”. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only true socialist is a libertarian, and the only true libertarian is a socialist (which is a pretty good working definition of an anarchist).
(As an aside here, I have become convinced that the disabled people's liberation movement is quite possibly the one movement which holds the key to unifying libertarianism and socialism in such a way as to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in present left-libertarian thought, because it is quite possibly the only movement which is necessarily both libertarian and socialist. This, however, I also intend to expand on in a future post...)
My libertarian ethic basically boils down to this: no person has the right to forcibly prevent any other person from carrying out any action which harms no person other than the person doing it - or, to use a slightly more elegant phrase, “Do as thou wilt, an it harm none”. (OK, I'm not so into the mysticism... well, OK, sometimes...)
One corollary of this is that, as far as I am concerned, no moral judgement is possible of self-regarding actions - what X does to X is no one's business but X's. Of course, it can be convincingly argued that there is no such thing, in reality, as a wholly “self-regarding” action - but, still, I think that, in most everyday situations, the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions is fairly robust and fairly obvious.
Going a bit further, when it comes to other-regarding actions, as far as I am concerned, if all parties in any interaction are fully and freely consenting to that interaction, then no ethical wrong has been done. (Sure, there are plenty of things that 2 or more people can do to each other that I find deeply repellent, but squick does not morality make.) Thus, even one person killing another person might not be morally wrong, because there are situations in which people consent to their own deaths - and I support an inalienable right to suicide, despite the fact that I agree that “we shouldn't be offering assistance with suicide until people can get the assistance they need to get up in the morning”. (if anyone can find me the source of that quote, I'd be very grateful...)
It follows that my definition of “harming someone” isn't necessarily the same as the one generally accepted in mainstream society (and certainly not the same as that held by most medical professional types). As far as I am concerned, “harm” is not defined by material damage to a person, but by antithesis to that person's will – a person is harmed by having something happen to them that they don't want to happen. Thus, while performing bottom surgery on a trans person could certainly be considered “harm” by a purely material definition (a lot of pain, a lot of tissue damage, the loss of organs, a lot of energy needed to recover) – and if the person is transitioning from male to female in a patriarchal society, it will probably do social and economic “harm” as well – it's not harming that person, because it's what that person wants – whereas denying them that surgery emphatically is harming them.
Similarly, while I consider myself to be fundamentally anti-violence, my definition of “violence” isn't necessarily the same as the standard one. I define “violence” as the violation of a person's will, the imposition of something unwanted on a person (whether that something is material harm or anything else), or the prevention of that person from having choice or agency in what happens to hir. This means that consensual BDSM, even if it involves typically “violent” acts such as beatings, isn't violent, whereas, for example, forcing someone to live in a “nursing home”, where they are denied agency over things as basic as what and when they eat, if and when they can leave the house, and even when they can go to the toilet most definitely is.
(I have seen libertarians use different definitions of violence - for instance, while this is an awesome article, its use of the phrase “consensual sexual violence” is, IMO, unfortunate, because according to my definition of “violence” it's an oxymoron... however, I think my use of the word is the only consistent libertarian one which can keep the sense of “violence” being an inherently bad thing...)
(I can't consider myself a pacifist, in the strict sense of that word, because I do believe that, sometimes, a particular act of violence is necessary to prevent greater violence, and I also believe in the legitimacy of self-defence. Strangely enough, it was actually the abortion issue which led me to stop defining myself as a pacifist - when I did consider myself a pacifist (while I was still a Christian, but on my way into anarchism), I had to take an anti-abortion viewpoint, because I believed that - at least after a certain stage - a foetus was a person, and killing it was therefore violence against a person. The argument that it only becomes a person at birth didn't really work for me, because I fail to see a meaningful difference between a baby outside the womb and that same baby a few minutes earlier inside the womb. Realising that violence against a person can be necessary to prevent a greater violence (in this case, forcing the mother to go through pregnancy and labour against her will) resolved my feminism versus anti-violence problem for me...)
One question I have to ask myself is whether, and if so how, my libertarian morality has any connection to my autistic neurology. I believe that, in at least an indirect way, it does. The single defining experience of my undiagnosed autistic childhood, if I have to choose one, would be being treated as if my own beliefs and judgements about myself were false, and that others knew my needs and desires better than I did, meaning that it was appropriate to deny me those desires “for my own good”. Of course, I believe that all, or nearly all, children in Western society experience this – but I experienced it with a particular intensity that is very difficult to verbally describe, particularly to non-autistic people, yet, I have noticed, even with my difficulty in describing it easy for those who have similar experiences to understand.
One of the things that is most noticeable about autistic people is that, due to our differences from the norm in sensory perception, we tend to regard relatively small things (e.g. temperature, light levels, texture of food or of clothing) as crucially important, whereas most neurotypical people would regard them as trivial, as “not worth complaining about”, and certainly not as serious rights violations if (for example in the workplace) we don't get them. This, I think, actually extends more widely, to other areas of life. I have lost count of the number of times I have been outraged to the point of utter horror by instances of denial of autonomy that the vast majority of people would regard as either justifiable or trivial enough to be “not worth worrying about”.
One good example is restrictions placed on people in the name of “health and safety”, which the vast majority of people just seem to accept, without questioning, and even to regard as important examples of human rights being defended (usually in the context of a “right to be safe”). (The concept of a “right to be unsafe” seemingly either never occurs, or seems absurd, to them.) Yet, if one of those restrictions or impositions (e.g., having to wear ear plugs or plastic glasses to work in a factory) is something that is completely intolerable to someone because of autistic sensory issues, although that person would be perfectly capable of doing the job if ze didn't have to wear them, then the ridiculousness of such paternalism (an employer being forced, against both hir own interest and that of the worker, to force a worker to wear something that ze not only doesn't want to, but that would also probably vastly increase hir likelihood of having a dangerous accident due to putting hir in a state of sensory overload) becomes all too obvious to that person. (Yes, I have lost jobs over that exact issue.)
(An equivalent for people with physical impairments would probably be not being allowed to use lifts in an emergency such as a fire – something ostensibly for “safety”, but which leaves people unable to use stairs completely unable to get out of the building unaided in such an emergency...)
A very uncomfortable thing about being against such things is that, usually, it puts me in complete opposition to the vast majority of socialists, and even many anarchists, and the only people who are likely to agree with me are Daily Mail-style conservatives who like to rail against “political correctness gone mad” and extreme “right-libertarians”, whose pro-capitalist positions I find as vile as paternalism...
I think autistic people very often feel the desire to be “left alone”, to be allowed to live our lives as we see fit rather than constantly harassed and questioned in “concerned” terms about why we are doing things that seem counter-intuitive to neurotypical people, far more keenly than the desire to be “supported” (in the sense of active intervention). I think this “naturally” does lead to a libertarian mindset, simply from universalising what we want for ourselves into what we want for all people.
However, I'm nervous of such a viewpoint being attributed totally to “the autistic experience”, both because I've also known autistic people with highly authoritarian or paternalistic views on some aspects of life, and because it reduces belief to an inevitable result of neurology, rather than something arrived at by individual choice or reasoning, which in turn could lead to such beliefs being dismissed as “pathological”, which is IMO one of the worst kinds of illibertarianism of all (personally, I don't think that, even if a belief was an inevitable consequence of neurology, that that would make it “pathological” - but that doesn't mean I don't think the danger of such attribution is real)...
Anyway, the main purpose of this post was to set out the basic ethical “framework” that underlies most of my more specific positions on issues. It probably isn't complete, and I'll probably return to the subject at some point in the future. Debate welcome...
Libertarianism is my most basic and fundamental ethical and political principle - it is what underlies pretty much all my other principles. I am an anti-capitalist, a feminist, a believer in the social model of disability (there needs to be a snappy word for that - social-modellist?), etc., because I am a libertarian, and not vice versa.
Unfortunately, the word “libertarianism”, particularly in English-speaking countries, has been grossly distorted in meaning in its commonest usages - hence my need to explain here what it means to me...
“Libertarianism” has seemingly come to mean a sort of amoral, social-Darwinist style of extreme free-market capitalism, based around a belief that “free trade” (something which I actually believe is an oxymoron, at least when using the word “trade” as it is generally used in an economic context) is the only ethically acceptable way to run an economy. However, this isn't the word's original meaning - according to Wikipedia, the term was coined by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, although other sources say it was first used by Proudhon himself. At any rate, the original (and still mostly current in Europe) usage of the term as a self-description was by anti-capitalists, and the “default” libertarian position was and is the one which needs a qualifier as “left-libertarian” or “libertarian communist/socialist” in the UK and US.
Libertarianism, as far as I am concerned, means a political philosophy which holds freedom from coercion as its primary value, the value which all other values derive from. Thus, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be a feminist, because all of the key feminist issues, as far as I can tell, revolve around women lacking and deserving the freedom to control their own lives and their own bodies, and fighting for liberation from a restrictive system of patriarchal family and relationship structures and gender roles. Similarly, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be an anti-capitalist, because capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty - as exchange-value, the most fundamental component of capitalist economics, needs some form of authority to define and regulate it, and the capitalist wage-labour system could not exist without coercion (at least in its negative form of threats, e.g. of poverty for not working). (I will expand on this particular topic in a future post, because it's hugely controversial to say the least, and I think it deserves a post to itself.)
As Wikipedia notes, “Libertarian is an antonym of authoritarian” - i.e., it is not, despite the popular understanding in the English-speaking world, an antonym of “socialist”. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only true socialist is a libertarian, and the only true libertarian is a socialist (which is a pretty good working definition of an anarchist).
(As an aside here, I have become convinced that the disabled people's liberation movement is quite possibly the one movement which holds the key to unifying libertarianism and socialism in such a way as to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in present left-libertarian thought, because it is quite possibly the only movement which is necessarily both libertarian and socialist. This, however, I also intend to expand on in a future post...)
My libertarian ethic basically boils down to this: no person has the right to forcibly prevent any other person from carrying out any action which harms no person other than the person doing it - or, to use a slightly more elegant phrase, “Do as thou wilt, an it harm none”. (OK, I'm not so into the mysticism... well, OK, sometimes...)
One corollary of this is that, as far as I am concerned, no moral judgement is possible of self-regarding actions - what X does to X is no one's business but X's. Of course, it can be convincingly argued that there is no such thing, in reality, as a wholly “self-regarding” action - but, still, I think that, in most everyday situations, the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions is fairly robust and fairly obvious.
Going a bit further, when it comes to other-regarding actions, as far as I am concerned, if all parties in any interaction are fully and freely consenting to that interaction, then no ethical wrong has been done. (Sure, there are plenty of things that 2 or more people can do to each other that I find deeply repellent, but squick does not morality make.) Thus, even one person killing another person might not be morally wrong, because there are situations in which people consent to their own deaths - and I support an inalienable right to suicide, despite the fact that I agree that “we shouldn't be offering assistance with suicide until people can get the assistance they need to get up in the morning”. (if anyone can find me the source of that quote, I'd be very grateful...)
It follows that my definition of “harming someone” isn't necessarily the same as the one generally accepted in mainstream society (and certainly not the same as that held by most medical professional types). As far as I am concerned, “harm” is not defined by material damage to a person, but by antithesis to that person's will – a person is harmed by having something happen to them that they don't want to happen. Thus, while performing bottom surgery on a trans person could certainly be considered “harm” by a purely material definition (a lot of pain, a lot of tissue damage, the loss of organs, a lot of energy needed to recover) – and if the person is transitioning from male to female in a patriarchal society, it will probably do social and economic “harm” as well – it's not harming that person, because it's what that person wants – whereas denying them that surgery emphatically is harming them.
Similarly, while I consider myself to be fundamentally anti-violence, my definition of “violence” isn't necessarily the same as the standard one. I define “violence” as the violation of a person's will, the imposition of something unwanted on a person (whether that something is material harm or anything else), or the prevention of that person from having choice or agency in what happens to hir. This means that consensual BDSM, even if it involves typically “violent” acts such as beatings, isn't violent, whereas, for example, forcing someone to live in a “nursing home”, where they are denied agency over things as basic as what and when they eat, if and when they can leave the house, and even when they can go to the toilet most definitely is.
(I have seen libertarians use different definitions of violence - for instance, while this is an awesome article, its use of the phrase “consensual sexual violence” is, IMO, unfortunate, because according to my definition of “violence” it's an oxymoron... however, I think my use of the word is the only consistent libertarian one which can keep the sense of “violence” being an inherently bad thing...)
(I can't consider myself a pacifist, in the strict sense of that word, because I do believe that, sometimes, a particular act of violence is necessary to prevent greater violence, and I also believe in the legitimacy of self-defence. Strangely enough, it was actually the abortion issue which led me to stop defining myself as a pacifist - when I did consider myself a pacifist (while I was still a Christian, but on my way into anarchism), I had to take an anti-abortion viewpoint, because I believed that - at least after a certain stage - a foetus was a person, and killing it was therefore violence against a person. The argument that it only becomes a person at birth didn't really work for me, because I fail to see a meaningful difference between a baby outside the womb and that same baby a few minutes earlier inside the womb. Realising that violence against a person can be necessary to prevent a greater violence (in this case, forcing the mother to go through pregnancy and labour against her will) resolved my feminism versus anti-violence problem for me...)
One question I have to ask myself is whether, and if so how, my libertarian morality has any connection to my autistic neurology. I believe that, in at least an indirect way, it does. The single defining experience of my undiagnosed autistic childhood, if I have to choose one, would be being treated as if my own beliefs and judgements about myself were false, and that others knew my needs and desires better than I did, meaning that it was appropriate to deny me those desires “for my own good”. Of course, I believe that all, or nearly all, children in Western society experience this – but I experienced it with a particular intensity that is very difficult to verbally describe, particularly to non-autistic people, yet, I have noticed, even with my difficulty in describing it easy for those who have similar experiences to understand.
One of the things that is most noticeable about autistic people is that, due to our differences from the norm in sensory perception, we tend to regard relatively small things (e.g. temperature, light levels, texture of food or of clothing) as crucially important, whereas most neurotypical people would regard them as trivial, as “not worth complaining about”, and certainly not as serious rights violations if (for example in the workplace) we don't get them. This, I think, actually extends more widely, to other areas of life. I have lost count of the number of times I have been outraged to the point of utter horror by instances of denial of autonomy that the vast majority of people would regard as either justifiable or trivial enough to be “not worth worrying about”.
One good example is restrictions placed on people in the name of “health and safety”, which the vast majority of people just seem to accept, without questioning, and even to regard as important examples of human rights being defended (usually in the context of a “right to be safe”). (The concept of a “right to be unsafe” seemingly either never occurs, or seems absurd, to them.) Yet, if one of those restrictions or impositions (e.g., having to wear ear plugs or plastic glasses to work in a factory) is something that is completely intolerable to someone because of autistic sensory issues, although that person would be perfectly capable of doing the job if ze didn't have to wear them, then the ridiculousness of such paternalism (an employer being forced, against both hir own interest and that of the worker, to force a worker to wear something that ze not only doesn't want to, but that would also probably vastly increase hir likelihood of having a dangerous accident due to putting hir in a state of sensory overload) becomes all too obvious to that person. (Yes, I have lost jobs over that exact issue.)
(An equivalent for people with physical impairments would probably be not being allowed to use lifts in an emergency such as a fire – something ostensibly for “safety”, but which leaves people unable to use stairs completely unable to get out of the building unaided in such an emergency...)
A very uncomfortable thing about being against such things is that, usually, it puts me in complete opposition to the vast majority of socialists, and even many anarchists, and the only people who are likely to agree with me are Daily Mail-style conservatives who like to rail against “political correctness gone mad” and extreme “right-libertarians”, whose pro-capitalist positions I find as vile as paternalism...
I think autistic people very often feel the desire to be “left alone”, to be allowed to live our lives as we see fit rather than constantly harassed and questioned in “concerned” terms about why we are doing things that seem counter-intuitive to neurotypical people, far more keenly than the desire to be “supported” (in the sense of active intervention). I think this “naturally” does lead to a libertarian mindset, simply from universalising what we want for ourselves into what we want for all people.
However, I'm nervous of such a viewpoint being attributed totally to “the autistic experience”, both because I've also known autistic people with highly authoritarian or paternalistic views on some aspects of life, and because it reduces belief to an inevitable result of neurology, rather than something arrived at by individual choice or reasoning, which in turn could lead to such beliefs being dismissed as “pathological”, which is IMO one of the worst kinds of illibertarianism of all (personally, I don't think that, even if a belief was an inevitable consequence of neurology, that that would make it “pathological” - but that doesn't mean I don't think the danger of such attribution is real)...
Anyway, the main purpose of this post was to set out the basic ethical “framework” that underlies most of my more specific positions on issues. It probably isn't complete, and I'll probably return to the subject at some point in the future. Debate welcome...
Monday, July 14, 2008
Britain's Missing Top Model
So... the other day, I watched the first 2 episodes of the BBC “reality TV” show, “Britain's Missing Top Model”. This show is about 8 young disabled women who are competing to get to be a professional model (only one gets the contract at the end, and one or more are eliminated each week, similarly to other “reality TV” shows like Survivor or Big Brother). I had very, very mixed feelings about the program...
I'll start with the representation of impairment and disability on the show. Right from the start of the first episode, the focus on impairment in a very individual way was obvious – the opening shots included one of the contestants sobbing about it being “not fair” that her “body won't do what I tell it to do”. There also seemed to be a lot of hierarchies of impairment – both conscious and unconscious – on display – one of the contestants, Debbie, who has one arm, considered herself to be “lucky” for “only” missing an arm, in comparison to Sophie, a wheelchair user, while Sophie was presented (possibly through selective editing) to be heavily in conflict with the 2 deaf women, due to her impairment being “visible” and theirs not. This polarisation felt strongly like it was the deliberate intent of the programme-makers to create conflict between different impairments.
(The hierarchies seemed to be in both directions – both considering “more severe” impairments to be “more genuine” than “less severe” ones, and considering the “less impaired” to be “luckier” or “better off” than the “more impaired”. I need to write a post on the various forms of hierarchy of impairment that exist...)
While there was no evidence that anyone involved in the program was aware of the social model of disability, there was some interesting stuff around disability, as opposed to impairment, being relative to surroundings and circumstances – for example, both the deaf women expressed sentiments to the effect that they did not consider themselves “disabled” in primarily-deaf environments, or environments where they were known and understood, but that they did feel disabled in the environment of the show, where hearing and oral communication were important – even “disabled” relative to people with other impairments... which, IMO, is at least the beginning of an understanding of the social model, but it was somewhat disappointing that this was not really explored further...
The attitude of one contestant in particular, Kelly (who was born “missing” one hand and forearm) was interesting, if problematic, as she several times said that she “never considered herself to have a disability”, with an insistence that suggested she implicitly saw “having a disability” as an inherently negative thing that she wanted to distance herself from. (Kelly also possibly revealed some of my own prejudices, as I found myself almost instinctively taking a strong dislike to her due to her accent and tone of voice, which were of the type I tend to associate with strongly intolerant people with a lot invested in being culturally “mainstream”, and a particularly vicious and hateful attitude towards those who are not “mainstream” - of course, there isn't any real inherent link between that attitude and any particular vocal mannerisms, but it was a very strong, instant association for me.)
There was a lot of discussion on the BBC message boards about representation, particularly in terms of the range of impairments represented. Of course, with the almost infinite diversity of impairments, to be “fully representative” with a group of only 8 people is realistically impossible – although some absences, such as any kind of neurodiversity/cognitive impairment (unless Jenny's brain injury counts) or any kind of visual impairment, were particularly noticeable, especially when there were 2 deaf women and 2 arm amputees out of the 8. However, the representation issue that is more interesting to me is that, despite the fact that they apparently had 350 applicants from whom to pick the final 8, those they picked were all white and very thin (as well as young and “conventionally attractive”) - in fact, the programme makers seemed to be so desperate for thin, white women that, even though the title was "Britain's Missing Top Model", they had to ship in thin white girls from Holland and America rather than allow a non-white or bigger-than-size-10 British woman in. (There was no data in the first 2 episodes as to whether any of the 8 women was anything other than heterosexual.)
(I think it's very telling that Lilli, the contestant who was least thin and darkest in hair and skin tone (although still “white” and still definitely thin by global female standards), and who was eliminated at the end of the second episode mainly for not being “in shape” - which is, I think, actually a subtler form of disablism – was also the one who, after being eliminated, seemed to have something of a feminist awakening, and developed a critique of the modelling industry which led to her no longer wanting to be a model. This was for me the most positive thing in the first 2 episodes...)
There was also a commenter on the BBC message board who said that hir friend had applied to go on the show, but was not picked because she was “too disabled” (although ze didn't clarify exactly what that meant)...
Of course, it's easy to make the argument that any questions of the disability politics of the programme are overshadowed by criticisms of the modelling industry as a whole (and ones that I would mostly agree with). However, there is ambiguity here -while modelling is (IMO) undoubtedly a form of objectification, and full of all kinds of nasty sexist, patriarchal and capitalist elements, which there has been ample analysis of, disabled people's responses to sexual objectification are complex, as Eli Clare (who now has a website! woot!) points out in the chapter “Reading Across the Grain” in “Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation”, when talking about disabled model Ellen Stohl, who appeared on the cover of Playboy:
”Many of the feminists who criticized Ellen didn't know two cents about disability and ableism. For them objectification meant only sexual objectification. Within their analytic framework, soft pornography, like Playboy, was simply and entirely problematic. They rejected Ellen and the disability activists who supported her as dupes of the patriarchy. I wanted to shake them out of their narrow, single-issue analysis. I won't deny that Ellen is sexually objectified in the pages of Playboy and on the cover of New Mobility. But within the context of disability, the meaning of this objectification shifts. Ellen becoming a sex object, being seen and acknowledged as sexy, splashed in colour across the pages of a sex magazine, represents an important fault line, a sudden and welcome admission of disabled people – or at least one white, heterosexual disabled woman whose disability can be made invisible before a camera – as sexual.”
(italics mine)
Clare goes on, on the next page, to say:
”At the same time, I want to remind Ellen's disabled supporters about the dangers of accepting beauty and sexuality as defined exclusively by nondisabled people, by straight people, by white people, by rich people, by men. Let us remember disabled bodies in all their variety. I look at my body set off-center by CP, tense and shaky; my butch body often taken to be male; my body marked, both visibly and not, by rape. I will never look like Ellen Stohl. Nor will most of us. We will never, as Ellen so gracefully does, meet the dominant culture's standards for beauty and sexual attractiveness. Even if we did, I do not want Playboy to define anyone's sexuality – female or male, disabled or not. I believe disability activists need to feel some ambivalence about Ellen in Playboy, even about Ellen on the cover of New Mobility.
My analysis of the sexual aspects of “Britain's Missing Top Model” is pretty much exactly like Clare's analysis of Ellen Stohl's Playboy shoot – while I think the same feminist analysis applies as to any presentation of female bodies for the male gaze, from a disability perspective it can be seen that objectification is a “step up” from not even being considered worthy of objectification. However, all of the disabled women in “Britain's Missing Top Model” fit the same criteria as Ellen Stohl – they are white, young, thin, “conventionally” attractive (at least by the conventions of the “mainstream”, Western modelling industry – which arguably aren't even the same as the conventions of most “mainstream” Western people), and can be positioned and photographed so that they do not “appear disabled” - which is probably the root of Sophie's conflicts with some of the other contestants, as well as Lara Masters' attacks on the deaf and “invisibly” disabled contestants – even though Sophie also fits those criteria as well as Ellen Stohl does (having the same impairment), and even Lara Masters, despite having a more severe and noticeable impairment than any of the contestants, is still thin, white and “conventionally” attractive.
Also, despite the apparent intent to objectify these women in, if not an explicitly sexual, then at least a gendered and thus implicitly sexual context, they seemed oddly desexualised – despite me being exclusively attracted to women, attracted to a pretty broad range of female body types, generally most attracted to women in roughly the same age range as the “Britain's Missing Top Model” contestants, and having a specific “thing” for visibly disabled women, I didn't find myself feeling aroused once while watching the first 2 episodes – in fact, in the scenes which were most obviously intended to be “sexy”, the lingerie modelling in the shop window (in which the contestants found themselves filmed nonconsensually by random male passers-by with camera phones, as well as consensually by the programme makers, and similarly jeered and whistled at by passing men), I felt much more distaste than arousal. But then, that could just be me being “wired up wrong”...
There were a number of things said which I found strikingly, even shockingly, nasty and bigoted which in fact probably had little or nothing to do with disablism, and a lot more to do with the prejudices inherent in modelling as an entire industry (or, indeed, even Western capitalist society as an entire culture) – such as one of the contestants' statement that she felt like she was “not a woman” when not wearing make-up, or the statement by one of the presenters at the start of the second episode that “99% of people never will have... beauty” - which, while probably not intentionally disablist, certainly shows an attitude to the concept of “beauty” which feels to me like it's made out of the same sort of ideological “fabric” as disablism.
The constant, infantilising use of the term “girls” for adult women (whose ages were between 19 and 27) also really annoyed me, especially as it's a usage that, while commonplace, I always make a specific effort to avoid (OK, I have one friend who refers to most women under about 40 as “girls”, but she also refers to most men under about 40 as “boys”, so it's presumably not sexism in her case) – again, this was probably more unexaminedly sexist than disablist in intent, but it felt especially bad in the context of the incredibly prevalent infantilisation of disabled adults (which I think is probably even stronger than patriarchy's infantilising of women) and its very real concrete consequences of loss of autonomy in fundamental aspects of life.
Another observation that struck me from the second episode was the implicit anti-pleasure agenda of attacking women for going out drinking and enjoying themselves, and the way that that was linked to their looks, but not just in a “looks-ist” way, but also through a “health-ist” agenda – the idea that a woman's body is not something she can make her own decisions over, but something that needs to be paternalistically policed in order to keep it within an “acceptable” standard of attractiveness (which quality is, of course, not defined by the woman herself). The petty, patronising attitude of the casting director also added to the impression that one of the main things this show is about is women hating women.
This leads in to what was actually the strongest thing I came away from this with – the inherently deeply nasty ideology of nearly all these type of “reality TV” shows. Like other programmes whose format involves contestants being eliminated at the end of each “round” - e.g. “Big Brother”, “Survivor”, “The Weakest Link” and plenty of other “talent show” type competitions, it's all about conflict and attrition rather than co-operation – with each contestant encouraged to be jealous and suspicious of all the others, because there can only be one winner. This kind of format inevitably leads to petty, vindictive cruelty and backstabbing – with the irony being that the purported “realism” of “reality TV” is a complete fake, because, far from such shows showing people “as they really are”, and thus revealing some sort of fundamental truth about human nature, their environment is a completely unnatural one, bearing no reasonable relationship to actual “real life”...
It's worth noting that, for people with many types of impairments (perhaps unsurprisingly, those unrepresented on the show), such an environment would be completely unbearable – many autistic or otherwise cognitively impaired people, with a lack of the sort of mainstream “social skills”, non-verbal communication abilities, “tactical” dishonesty, etc. that are acutely necessary for dealing with such situations would feel so much anxiety that it could easily lead to complete breakdown, and would almost certainly be the first victims of the nasty, competitive instincts unleashed by such manipulation – they wouldn't stand a chance, simply because of their impairments, which is, I think, an aspect of disablism which probably never even occurred to the programme makers, so deeply ingrained was their implicitly social-Darwinist ideology. (The horrific recent case of Alex Barton, an autistic boy who was actually “voted out” of his primary school class by his teacher, in a “re-enactment” of the “reality TV” show “Survivor”, inescapably comes to mind...)
This post has already got really long, and I'm sure there are other worthwhile observations I've missed out. But no other disability blogger that I'm aware of seems to have posted about this show, so I thought I'd be fairly thorough in putting down everything I thought about it... I watched this, despite already knowing I would dislike it because I already knew how fundamentally unpleasant to someone of anything like my ethical/political views both “reality TV” and the mainstream modelling industry are, simply because it featured disabled people on UK TV, which is a fairly rare thing in itself (at least in any context other than “medical” documentaries, which tend to be all impairment, no disability). It probably actually is raising more awareness of disability issues than any other BBC program I can think of from the last year or so. Still, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother to watch the remaining episodes...
The BBC's official “Britain's Missing Top Model” site is here, (on which the already shown episodes can be watched on the BBC iPlayer – not sure if this is only available within the UK) and there is a discussion board for the show on the BBC Ouch site here.
I'll start with the representation of impairment and disability on the show. Right from the start of the first episode, the focus on impairment in a very individual way was obvious – the opening shots included one of the contestants sobbing about it being “not fair” that her “body won't do what I tell it to do”. There also seemed to be a lot of hierarchies of impairment – both conscious and unconscious – on display – one of the contestants, Debbie, who has one arm, considered herself to be “lucky” for “only” missing an arm, in comparison to Sophie, a wheelchair user, while Sophie was presented (possibly through selective editing) to be heavily in conflict with the 2 deaf women, due to her impairment being “visible” and theirs not. This polarisation felt strongly like it was the deliberate intent of the programme-makers to create conflict between different impairments.
(The hierarchies seemed to be in both directions – both considering “more severe” impairments to be “more genuine” than “less severe” ones, and considering the “less impaired” to be “luckier” or “better off” than the “more impaired”. I need to write a post on the various forms of hierarchy of impairment that exist...)
While there was no evidence that anyone involved in the program was aware of the social model of disability, there was some interesting stuff around disability, as opposed to impairment, being relative to surroundings and circumstances – for example, both the deaf women expressed sentiments to the effect that they did not consider themselves “disabled” in primarily-deaf environments, or environments where they were known and understood, but that they did feel disabled in the environment of the show, where hearing and oral communication were important – even “disabled” relative to people with other impairments... which, IMO, is at least the beginning of an understanding of the social model, but it was somewhat disappointing that this was not really explored further...
The attitude of one contestant in particular, Kelly (who was born “missing” one hand and forearm) was interesting, if problematic, as she several times said that she “never considered herself to have a disability”, with an insistence that suggested she implicitly saw “having a disability” as an inherently negative thing that she wanted to distance herself from. (Kelly also possibly revealed some of my own prejudices, as I found myself almost instinctively taking a strong dislike to her due to her accent and tone of voice, which were of the type I tend to associate with strongly intolerant people with a lot invested in being culturally “mainstream”, and a particularly vicious and hateful attitude towards those who are not “mainstream” - of course, there isn't any real inherent link between that attitude and any particular vocal mannerisms, but it was a very strong, instant association for me.)
There was a lot of discussion on the BBC message boards about representation, particularly in terms of the range of impairments represented. Of course, with the almost infinite diversity of impairments, to be “fully representative” with a group of only 8 people is realistically impossible – although some absences, such as any kind of neurodiversity/cognitive impairment (unless Jenny's brain injury counts) or any kind of visual impairment, were particularly noticeable, especially when there were 2 deaf women and 2 arm amputees out of the 8. However, the representation issue that is more interesting to me is that, despite the fact that they apparently had 350 applicants from whom to pick the final 8, those they picked were all white and very thin (as well as young and “conventionally attractive”) - in fact, the programme makers seemed to be so desperate for thin, white women that, even though the title was "Britain's Missing Top Model", they had to ship in thin white girls from Holland and America rather than allow a non-white or bigger-than-size-10 British woman in. (There was no data in the first 2 episodes as to whether any of the 8 women was anything other than heterosexual.)
(I think it's very telling that Lilli, the contestant who was least thin and darkest in hair and skin tone (although still “white” and still definitely thin by global female standards), and who was eliminated at the end of the second episode mainly for not being “in shape” - which is, I think, actually a subtler form of disablism – was also the one who, after being eliminated, seemed to have something of a feminist awakening, and developed a critique of the modelling industry which led to her no longer wanting to be a model. This was for me the most positive thing in the first 2 episodes...)
There was also a commenter on the BBC message board who said that hir friend had applied to go on the show, but was not picked because she was “too disabled” (although ze didn't clarify exactly what that meant)...
Of course, it's easy to make the argument that any questions of the disability politics of the programme are overshadowed by criticisms of the modelling industry as a whole (and ones that I would mostly agree with). However, there is ambiguity here -while modelling is (IMO) undoubtedly a form of objectification, and full of all kinds of nasty sexist, patriarchal and capitalist elements, which there has been ample analysis of, disabled people's responses to sexual objectification are complex, as Eli Clare (who now has a website! woot!) points out in the chapter “Reading Across the Grain” in “Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation”, when talking about disabled model Ellen Stohl, who appeared on the cover of Playboy:
”Many of the feminists who criticized Ellen didn't know two cents about disability and ableism. For them objectification meant only sexual objectification. Within their analytic framework, soft pornography, like Playboy, was simply and entirely problematic. They rejected Ellen and the disability activists who supported her as dupes of the patriarchy. I wanted to shake them out of their narrow, single-issue analysis. I won't deny that Ellen is sexually objectified in the pages of Playboy and on the cover of New Mobility. But within the context of disability, the meaning of this objectification shifts. Ellen becoming a sex object, being seen and acknowledged as sexy, splashed in colour across the pages of a sex magazine, represents an important fault line, a sudden and welcome admission of disabled people – or at least one white, heterosexual disabled woman whose disability can be made invisible before a camera – as sexual.”
(italics mine)
Clare goes on, on the next page, to say:
”At the same time, I want to remind Ellen's disabled supporters about the dangers of accepting beauty and sexuality as defined exclusively by nondisabled people, by straight people, by white people, by rich people, by men. Let us remember disabled bodies in all their variety. I look at my body set off-center by CP, tense and shaky; my butch body often taken to be male; my body marked, both visibly and not, by rape. I will never look like Ellen Stohl. Nor will most of us. We will never, as Ellen so gracefully does, meet the dominant culture's standards for beauty and sexual attractiveness. Even if we did, I do not want Playboy to define anyone's sexuality – female or male, disabled or not. I believe disability activists need to feel some ambivalence about Ellen in Playboy, even about Ellen on the cover of New Mobility.
My analysis of the sexual aspects of “Britain's Missing Top Model” is pretty much exactly like Clare's analysis of Ellen Stohl's Playboy shoot – while I think the same feminist analysis applies as to any presentation of female bodies for the male gaze, from a disability perspective it can be seen that objectification is a “step up” from not even being considered worthy of objectification. However, all of the disabled women in “Britain's Missing Top Model” fit the same criteria as Ellen Stohl – they are white, young, thin, “conventionally” attractive (at least by the conventions of the “mainstream”, Western modelling industry – which arguably aren't even the same as the conventions of most “mainstream” Western people), and can be positioned and photographed so that they do not “appear disabled” - which is probably the root of Sophie's conflicts with some of the other contestants, as well as Lara Masters' attacks on the deaf and “invisibly” disabled contestants – even though Sophie also fits those criteria as well as Ellen Stohl does (having the same impairment), and even Lara Masters, despite having a more severe and noticeable impairment than any of the contestants, is still thin, white and “conventionally” attractive.
Also, despite the apparent intent to objectify these women in, if not an explicitly sexual, then at least a gendered and thus implicitly sexual context, they seemed oddly desexualised – despite me being exclusively attracted to women, attracted to a pretty broad range of female body types, generally most attracted to women in roughly the same age range as the “Britain's Missing Top Model” contestants, and having a specific “thing” for visibly disabled women, I didn't find myself feeling aroused once while watching the first 2 episodes – in fact, in the scenes which were most obviously intended to be “sexy”, the lingerie modelling in the shop window (in which the contestants found themselves filmed nonconsensually by random male passers-by with camera phones, as well as consensually by the programme makers, and similarly jeered and whistled at by passing men), I felt much more distaste than arousal. But then, that could just be me being “wired up wrong”...
There were a number of things said which I found strikingly, even shockingly, nasty and bigoted which in fact probably had little or nothing to do with disablism, and a lot more to do with the prejudices inherent in modelling as an entire industry (or, indeed, even Western capitalist society as an entire culture) – such as one of the contestants' statement that she felt like she was “not a woman” when not wearing make-up, or the statement by one of the presenters at the start of the second episode that “99% of people never will have... beauty” - which, while probably not intentionally disablist, certainly shows an attitude to the concept of “beauty” which feels to me like it's made out of the same sort of ideological “fabric” as disablism.
The constant, infantilising use of the term “girls” for adult women (whose ages were between 19 and 27) also really annoyed me, especially as it's a usage that, while commonplace, I always make a specific effort to avoid (OK, I have one friend who refers to most women under about 40 as “girls”, but she also refers to most men under about 40 as “boys”, so it's presumably not sexism in her case) – again, this was probably more unexaminedly sexist than disablist in intent, but it felt especially bad in the context of the incredibly prevalent infantilisation of disabled adults (which I think is probably even stronger than patriarchy's infantilising of women) and its very real concrete consequences of loss of autonomy in fundamental aspects of life.
Another observation that struck me from the second episode was the implicit anti-pleasure agenda of attacking women for going out drinking and enjoying themselves, and the way that that was linked to their looks, but not just in a “looks-ist” way, but also through a “health-ist” agenda – the idea that a woman's body is not something she can make her own decisions over, but something that needs to be paternalistically policed in order to keep it within an “acceptable” standard of attractiveness (which quality is, of course, not defined by the woman herself). The petty, patronising attitude of the casting director also added to the impression that one of the main things this show is about is women hating women.
This leads in to what was actually the strongest thing I came away from this with – the inherently deeply nasty ideology of nearly all these type of “reality TV” shows. Like other programmes whose format involves contestants being eliminated at the end of each “round” - e.g. “Big Brother”, “Survivor”, “The Weakest Link” and plenty of other “talent show” type competitions, it's all about conflict and attrition rather than co-operation – with each contestant encouraged to be jealous and suspicious of all the others, because there can only be one winner. This kind of format inevitably leads to petty, vindictive cruelty and backstabbing – with the irony being that the purported “realism” of “reality TV” is a complete fake, because, far from such shows showing people “as they really are”, and thus revealing some sort of fundamental truth about human nature, their environment is a completely unnatural one, bearing no reasonable relationship to actual “real life”...
It's worth noting that, for people with many types of impairments (perhaps unsurprisingly, those unrepresented on the show), such an environment would be completely unbearable – many autistic or otherwise cognitively impaired people, with a lack of the sort of mainstream “social skills”, non-verbal communication abilities, “tactical” dishonesty, etc. that are acutely necessary for dealing with such situations would feel so much anxiety that it could easily lead to complete breakdown, and would almost certainly be the first victims of the nasty, competitive instincts unleashed by such manipulation – they wouldn't stand a chance, simply because of their impairments, which is, I think, an aspect of disablism which probably never even occurred to the programme makers, so deeply ingrained was their implicitly social-Darwinist ideology. (The horrific recent case of Alex Barton, an autistic boy who was actually “voted out” of his primary school class by his teacher, in a “re-enactment” of the “reality TV” show “Survivor”, inescapably comes to mind...)
This post has already got really long, and I'm sure there are other worthwhile observations I've missed out. But no other disability blogger that I'm aware of seems to have posted about this show, so I thought I'd be fairly thorough in putting down everything I thought about it... I watched this, despite already knowing I would dislike it because I already knew how fundamentally unpleasant to someone of anything like my ethical/political views both “reality TV” and the mainstream modelling industry are, simply because it featured disabled people on UK TV, which is a fairly rare thing in itself (at least in any context other than “medical” documentaries, which tend to be all impairment, no disability). It probably actually is raising more awareness of disability issues than any other BBC program I can think of from the last year or so. Still, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother to watch the remaining episodes...
The BBC's official “Britain's Missing Top Model” site is here, (on which the already shown episodes can be watched on the BBC iPlayer – not sure if this is only available within the UK) and there is a discussion board for the show on the BBC Ouch site here.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Feminist Activist Forum on trans and intersex issues, London, 12th July
Via Foibey:
Feminist Activist Forum
A Transgender and Intersex Learning Exchange:
Feminism and Gender & Sex Diversity.
12- 6.30pm, Saturday 12th July, Lambeth Women's Project, 166a Stockwell Road, London SW9 9TQ. Nearest Tube: Brixton.
FAF are presenting a learning exchange on trans and intersex issues and their relationship to feminism. The relationship between feminism and transgender in particular has not been a smooth one in the history of feminist activism. This learning exchange is geared toward people who may be unsure of the importance or relevance of transgender to feminism, particularly from an intergenerational perspective.
This event has been organised by a collective of trans and non-trans feminists, and trans-people will be actively involved in the running of the day, including speaking at and facilitating sessions.
We want this to be a safe space for people from all backgrounds/feminist perspectives to come together, ask questions, exchange ideas, make mistakes, learn, create, and build alliances.
Schedule
12.15 Welcome to FAF and Safer Spaces Guidelines
12.30 PANEL: Everything you ever wanted to know about transgender issues but were afraid to ask
Speakers: Debbie, Col (film-maker), and Helen G (f-word blogger). Chair: Sophie.
An introduction to 'transgender' issues and the opportunity to listen to trans men and women's stories and experiences. This session will incorporate a Q&A session, where questions can be posed anonymously as well as openly, and a screening of the short-film 'The Jar'.
1.45 Lunch
Chance to have a natter and check out the artwork and resources.
2.15 PANEL: Second Wave Feminists talk out loud about transgender
Radical feminists have long known the benefits of organising autonomously from men in their grassroots activism. Facilitated by Gail (The Feminist Library), this panel sees Second Wave Feminists share their different experiences and ideas about women-only space and the question of transgender recognition. Speakers include Carol (a socialist-radical feminist).
3.45 WORKSHOP: Sex Diversity: The spectrum of sex beyond 'male' and 'female'
It is often taken for granted that there are only two sexes: male and female. This workshop, with Marcus and Daniel (a former biologist), explores the diversity of sexed experience. Come and learn about the spectrum of sexes and place yourself somewhere along the continuum.
5.15 DISCUSSION: Beyond the Binary: What are the feminist implications?
This session will ask: how have trans-gendered and gender variant people influenced feminism? What is feminism's relationship to binary structures- such as man/woman - - and how are binaries related to other hierarchical power structures in society? What are the links between trans-liberation struggles and the demands of the Women's Liberation Movement? Opportunities for creative responses and manifesto writing aplenty. Facilitated by diy activists Debi, Kris and Sherry.
6.30 Film Screening tbc
Please get in touch if you want to be involved- as a speaker, facilitator, film-maker, artist or if you wanna contribute something for our new trans-zine! If you are press please contact us for guidelines of the day (as part of FAF's safer spaces policy and the requests of some participants). This event is free and open to feminists of all genders. Lunch will be provided - food/money donations welcome.
Our venue is accessible by wheelchair but the toilet is not adapted and space is quite tight. We are endeavoring to find future spaces in London that are free/very cheap and fully accessible. If you have ideas please get in touch! Please contact us if you have creche needs or any other accessibility questions.
mail@feministactivistforum.org.uk
Solidarity Picnic
13th July, Hampstead Heath. Meet at 12pm, Hampstead Heath Station, South End Green, London
A picnic for feminists of all genders to come together, have fun, build friendship and community. Opportunities for football tournaments, pagan rituals, barbie-qs and skinny dipping, or just dipping. Please bring food/drinks/games to share! Not to be missed!
(hopefully corrected all the weird formatting that was in the cut and paste...)
Probably not going myself, but this sounds awesome. I hope it goes well...
(also a bit confused by the "second wave" bit - i thought "second wave" feminists mostly included the gender-deconstructionist radical feminist types, who are/were either opposed to transsexualism or denied its existence, and pro-trans feminism would generally be considered "third wave". Then again, i've never really got my head round all the so-called "waves" (which one are we on now? 4th? 5th?), and don't really find it useful terminology anyway - i just found the use of "second-wave" a bit confusing. Are the organisers of this event considering themselves to be "second wave", or is this meand to be a discourse between transfeminists and "second-wave" feminists? Regardless, it sounds like a really good debate, as long as outright transphobia isn't tolerated (which, in a trans-organised event, i'm sure it won't be)...)
Feminist Activist Forum
A Transgender and Intersex Learning Exchange:
Feminism and Gender & Sex Diversity.
12- 6.30pm, Saturday 12th July, Lambeth Women's Project, 166a Stockwell Road, London SW9 9TQ. Nearest Tube: Brixton.
FAF are presenting a learning exchange on trans and intersex issues and their relationship to feminism. The relationship between feminism and transgender in particular has not been a smooth one in the history of feminist activism. This learning exchange is geared toward people who may be unsure of the importance or relevance of transgender to feminism, particularly from an intergenerational perspective.
This event has been organised by a collective of trans and non-trans feminists, and trans-people will be actively involved in the running of the day, including speaking at and facilitating sessions.
We want this to be a safe space for people from all backgrounds/feminist perspectives to come together, ask questions, exchange ideas, make mistakes, learn, create, and build alliances.
Schedule
12.15 Welcome to FAF and Safer Spaces Guidelines
12.30 PANEL: Everything you ever wanted to know about transgender issues but were afraid to ask
Speakers: Debbie, Col (film-maker), and Helen G (f-word blogger). Chair: Sophie.
An introduction to 'transgender' issues and the opportunity to listen to trans men and women's stories and experiences. This session will incorporate a Q&A session, where questions can be posed anonymously as well as openly, and a screening of the short-film 'The Jar'.
1.45 Lunch
Chance to have a natter and check out the artwork and resources.
2.15 PANEL: Second Wave Feminists talk out loud about transgender
Radical feminists have long known the benefits of organising autonomously from men in their grassroots activism. Facilitated by Gail (The Feminist Library), this panel sees Second Wave Feminists share their different experiences and ideas about women-only space and the question of transgender recognition. Speakers include Carol (a socialist-radical feminist).
3.45 WORKSHOP: Sex Diversity: The spectrum of sex beyond 'male' and 'female'
It is often taken for granted that there are only two sexes: male and female. This workshop, with Marcus and Daniel (a former biologist), explores the diversity of sexed experience. Come and learn about the spectrum of sexes and place yourself somewhere along the continuum.
5.15 DISCUSSION: Beyond the Binary: What are the feminist implications?
This session will ask: how have trans-gendered and gender variant people influenced feminism? What is feminism's relationship to binary structures- such as man/woman - - and how are binaries related to other hierarchical power structures in society? What are the links between trans-liberation struggles and the demands of the Women's Liberation Movement? Opportunities for creative responses and manifesto writing aplenty. Facilitated by diy activists Debi, Kris and Sherry.
6.30 Film Screening tbc
Please get in touch if you want to be involved- as a speaker, facilitator, film-maker, artist or if you wanna contribute something for our new trans-zine! If you are press please contact us for guidelines of the day (as part of FAF's safer spaces policy and the requests of some participants). This event is free and open to feminists of all genders. Lunch will be provided - food/money donations welcome.
Our venue is accessible by wheelchair but the toilet is not adapted and space is quite tight. We are endeavoring to find future spaces in London that are free/very cheap and fully accessible. If you have ideas please get in touch! Please contact us if you have creche needs or any other accessibility questions.
mail@feministactivistforum.org.uk
Solidarity Picnic
13th July, Hampstead Heath. Meet at 12pm, Hampstead Heath Station, South End Green, London
A picnic for feminists of all genders to come together, have fun, build friendship and community. Opportunities for football tournaments, pagan rituals, barbie-qs and skinny dipping, or just dipping. Please bring food/drinks/games to share! Not to be missed!
(hopefully corrected all the weird formatting that was in the cut and paste...)
Probably not going myself, but this sounds awesome. I hope it goes well...
(also a bit confused by the "second wave" bit - i thought "second wave" feminists mostly included the gender-deconstructionist radical feminist types, who are/were either opposed to transsexualism or denied its existence, and pro-trans feminism would generally be considered "third wave". Then again, i've never really got my head round all the so-called "waves" (which one are we on now? 4th? 5th?), and don't really find it useful terminology anyway - i just found the use of "second-wave" a bit confusing. Are the organisers of this event considering themselves to be "second wave", or is this meand to be a discourse between transfeminists and "second-wave" feminists? Regardless, it sounds like a really good debate, as long as outright transphobia isn't tolerated (which, in a trans-organised event, i'm sure it won't be)...)
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #1
The first Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy is here. Absolutely loads of awesome posts (many of which i know i agree with, a few i know i disagree with, and quite a lot that i need to think a whole lot more about) - i haven't even read through them all yet, but they cover topics like sex work, porn and anti-porn, BDSM, sexual orientation and presumptions about it, transsexuality, and more... there are loads on topics (such as the relationship between radical feminism, sex work, and Marxist concepts of exploitation) that i need to write about, if and when i can get my writing head together enough to do so...
(I'd love to write something bringing disability into it for the second one, if there is going to be a second one...)
(I'd love to write something bringing disability into it for the second one, if there is going to be a second one...)
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Another awesome call for papers...
This one via Miss Crip Chick:
“Feminism For Freaks”
At its best, feminism offers an emancipatory potential from gendered oppression, inequality, and violence. At its worst, however, feminism can work to simply affirm the rights of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, and exclude the voices of already-marginalised groups such as women of colour, trans* women, sex workers and so on. Like Derrida’s democracy, a truly liberatory feminism is mostly a feminism to come.
Not un-coincidentally, those marginalised groups of women are often demonised by the dominant culture, rendered as monstrous - simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, compelling and threatening, desirable and disgusting – and forever denied a voice of our own. The question of if and how monstrosity can be reclaimed or re-worked is a vexed one for feminists.
We therefore invite proposals that affirm the voices of socially excluded people, that seek to create new and exciting knowledge and address themselves to feminist theory and activism or the wider culture, on such topics including, but not limited to:
* Monstrous bodies and identities
* Social marginalisation and exclusions (for instance, borders, walls, and immigration laws, and the silencing of voices such as those of women of colour and transgendered people)
* Liberation/transformation/organisation
* sex work
* queer sexualities and genders
* BDSM
* Visible signs of difference (Muslim women wearing the veil, disabled bodies etc)
* religion and spirituality
* freaks in popular culture, body modification etc
* fat positivity
Academic, non-fiction and creative work will be considered–the call is broad, and we’re willing to accommodate new and interesting work by freaks of all kinds.
Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by May 31st to estrangedcognition[at]hotmail.com and suzanmanuel[at]gmail.com
*Note - Given that some contributors may not feel safe or comfortable telling their stories in the public sphere, submissions under pseudonyms will be accepted.
“Feminism For Freaks”
At its best, feminism offers an emancipatory potential from gendered oppression, inequality, and violence. At its worst, however, feminism can work to simply affirm the rights of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, and exclude the voices of already-marginalised groups such as women of colour, trans* women, sex workers and so on. Like Derrida’s democracy, a truly liberatory feminism is mostly a feminism to come.
Not un-coincidentally, those marginalised groups of women are often demonised by the dominant culture, rendered as monstrous - simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, compelling and threatening, desirable and disgusting – and forever denied a voice of our own. The question of if and how monstrosity can be reclaimed or re-worked is a vexed one for feminists.
We therefore invite proposals that affirm the voices of socially excluded people, that seek to create new and exciting knowledge and address themselves to feminist theory and activism or the wider culture, on such topics including, but not limited to:
* Monstrous bodies and identities
* Social marginalisation and exclusions (for instance, borders, walls, and immigration laws, and the silencing of voices such as those of women of colour and transgendered people)
* Liberation/transformation/organisation
* sex work
* queer sexualities and genders
* BDSM
* Visible signs of difference (Muslim women wearing the veil, disabled bodies etc)
* religion and spirituality
* freaks in popular culture, body modification etc
* fat positivity
Academic, non-fiction and creative work will be considered–the call is broad, and we’re willing to accommodate new and interesting work by freaks of all kinds.
Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by May 31st to estrangedcognition[at]hotmail.com and suzanmanuel[at]gmail.com
*Note - Given that some contributors may not feel safe or comfortable telling their stories in the public sphere, submissions under pseudonyms will be accepted.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Stuff I have found recently
Haven't been feeling up to writing again recently. I have a huge list of posts i'm meaning to write (or maybe topics i'm meaning to write posts on), quite a few of which are ones i've said i would write to other people, which i really do intend to write soon (for a given value of "soon"), but it's going to have to be when i've got a more coherent head on.
I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.
One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.
Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...
edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...
further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:
This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.
On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:
"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.
When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12
The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."
-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )
I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).
Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.
I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...
I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.
One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.
Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...
edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...
further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:
This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.
On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:
"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.
When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12
The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."
-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )
I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).
Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.
I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...
Friday, February 29, 2008
Queer & Trans Demo, Manchester, tomorrow (Saturday)
Just got emailed this (kind of late because my email has been playing up). I know it's very short notice (I can't go, i don't have the money to get to Manchester tomorrow), but just on the off chance anyone from Manchester or thereabouts is reading this and hasn;t heard about it already...
Name: QUEER TRANS BLOCK! Reclaiming the night and our rights!
Tagline: 5:30pm Sat.1st March - All genders all sexualities all feminists march for liberation and human rights!
Host: Trans Youth Network
Type: Causes - Rally
Time and PlaceDate: Saturday, March 1, 2008
Time: 5:30pm - 11:00pm
Location: The Retro Bar
Street: 78 Sackville Street
City/Town: Manchester, United Kingdom
QUEER TRANS BLOCK!
Call out for show of trans queer solidarity!
All genders, all sexualities, all ages, all races and all backgrounds together -
Reclaiming the night, reclaiming our rights - and the streets!
When?
5:30pm onwards, Saturday 1st March 2008
Where?
5:30pm - Meet @ Retro Bar, 78 Sackville Street, Manchester, M1 3NJ
Map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=The+Retro+Bar+M1+3NJ&ie=UTF8&ll=53.477345,-2.235761&spn=0.012132,0.029182&z=15&iwloc=A
6pm - Congregate to march @ Sackville Park, Sackville Street, Manchester City Centre. Look out for the giant pink 'QUEER TRANS BLOCK' banner!
7:30pm - All genders rally @ Sackville Street, Manchester City Centre.
Please note: QUEER TRANS BLOCK will share the same start and end points on Sackville Street as the "women" only and "men" only demos, but will be actively queering gender, space and separatism as an entirely unique protest accountable to itself.
Please bring any info/fliers/zines/free resources/vegan cake to hand out which are trans-positive, queer-positive, sex-positive, anti-oppressive and celebratory of biodiversity!
Why?
QUEER TRANS BLOCK is a transfeminist response to the separatism, erasure and censorship of transwomen, transmen, sex workers, gendervariant, genderqueer, non-gender-normative and intersex folk within the populist feminist movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfeminism
QUEER TRANS BLOCK is called in memory of Sam Roberts, genderqueer human rights activist, eco-gender warrior and trans social worker/counsellor, who organised the mixed genders Reclaim The Night March and Rally in Ipswich, December 2006. This gender inclusive RTN rally gave a voice to everyone affected by the Ipswich sex workers' murders, especially the sex workers themselves:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/topics/gender/
As a result of this progressive community-based approach to RTN, Sam received death threats from and was even labelled as a "paedophile" by London Feminist Network, who denounced Ipswich mixed genders RTN. Sam was reviled by separatist feminists until herm death in May 2007.
One example of anti-trans separatist feminist propaganda designed to cause divisions:
http://www.questioningtransgender.org/
Sam's friends will read out some of hir poetry and give their own first hand accounts of Ipwich mixed genders RTN to inspire and provoke debate around the future of political movements actively challenging all forms of oppression and separatism.
The NUS Women's Campaign have publicised Reclaim The Night NORTH as being "women only (including trans women)", although this definition has been edited, erased and left out of all the other publicity materials for this significant national feminist demo for some unexplained reason:
http://www.officeronline.co.uk/women/275060.aspx
Currently, trans people are not protected from discrimination in the provision of goods and services in the UK, transsexual people in Wales are refused healthcare and treatment from NHS Gender Clinics by NHS Wales and there are no legal/cultural protections for trans people under 18, genderqueers, intersex folk and anyone who doesn't fit within the binary gender system of "male" or "female"- Homeless trans people are left for dead on the streets by local authorities who cannot provide safe appropriate housing to any vulnerable minority group.
There are no "official" figures for the amount of trans people who have been abused, raped, assaulted, murdered, suffered transphobic violence, hate crime and discrimination in all areas of their lives because they are all undocumented cases ignored within a system for cisgendered "men" or "women" only.
Reports and feedback on this transfeminist action can be found on:
Manchester Indymedia:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/manchester/
Trans Youth Network:
http://www.transyouth.org
G7UK Blog:
http://www.g7uk.com/
Get Bent Manchester:
http://www.get-bent-manchester.com
Quit moochin' on't'interweb, we'll see you on the streets, lovely people of all genders XXX
Name: QUEER TRANS BLOCK! Reclaiming the night and our rights!
Tagline: 5:30pm Sat.1st March - All genders all sexualities all feminists march for liberation and human rights!
Host: Trans Youth Network
Type: Causes - Rally
Time and PlaceDate: Saturday, March 1, 2008
Time: 5:30pm - 11:00pm
Location: The Retro Bar
Street: 78 Sackville Street
City/Town: Manchester, United Kingdom
QUEER TRANS BLOCK!
Call out for show of trans queer solidarity!
All genders, all sexualities, all ages, all races and all backgrounds together -
Reclaiming the night, reclaiming our rights - and the streets!
When?
5:30pm onwards, Saturday 1st March 2008
Where?
5:30pm - Meet @ Retro Bar, 78 Sackville Street, Manchester, M1 3NJ
Map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=The+Retro+Bar+M1+3NJ&ie=UTF8&ll=53.477345,-2.235761&spn=0.012132,0.029182&z=15&iwloc=A
6pm - Congregate to march @ Sackville Park, Sackville Street, Manchester City Centre. Look out for the giant pink 'QUEER TRANS BLOCK' banner!
7:30pm - All genders rally @ Sackville Street, Manchester City Centre.
Please note: QUEER TRANS BLOCK will share the same start and end points on Sackville Street as the "women" only and "men" only demos, but will be actively queering gender, space and separatism as an entirely unique protest accountable to itself.
Please bring any info/fliers/zines/free resources/vegan cake to hand out which are trans-positive, queer-positive, sex-positive, anti-oppressive and celebratory of biodiversity!
Why?
QUEER TRANS BLOCK is a transfeminist response to the separatism, erasure and censorship of transwomen, transmen, sex workers, gendervariant, genderqueer, non-gender-normative and intersex folk within the populist feminist movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfeminism
QUEER TRANS BLOCK is called in memory of Sam Roberts, genderqueer human rights activist, eco-gender warrior and trans social worker/counsellor, who organised the mixed genders Reclaim The Night March and Rally in Ipswich, December 2006. This gender inclusive RTN rally gave a voice to everyone affected by the Ipswich sex workers' murders, especially the sex workers themselves:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/topics/gender/
As a result of this progressive community-based approach to RTN, Sam received death threats from and was even labelled as a "paedophile" by London Feminist Network, who denounced Ipswich mixed genders RTN. Sam was reviled by separatist feminists until herm death in May 2007.
One example of anti-trans separatist feminist propaganda designed to cause divisions:
http://www.questioningtransgender.org/
Sam's friends will read out some of hir poetry and give their own first hand accounts of Ipwich mixed genders RTN to inspire and provoke debate around the future of political movements actively challenging all forms of oppression and separatism.
The NUS Women's Campaign have publicised Reclaim The Night NORTH as being "women only (including trans women)", although this definition has been edited, erased and left out of all the other publicity materials for this significant national feminist demo for some unexplained reason:
http://www.officeronline.co.uk/women/275060.aspx
Currently, trans people are not protected from discrimination in the provision of goods and services in the UK, transsexual people in Wales are refused healthcare and treatment from NHS Gender Clinics by NHS Wales and there are no legal/cultural protections for trans people under 18, genderqueers, intersex folk and anyone who doesn't fit within the binary gender system of "male" or "female"- Homeless trans people are left for dead on the streets by local authorities who cannot provide safe appropriate housing to any vulnerable minority group.
There are no "official" figures for the amount of trans people who have been abused, raped, assaulted, murdered, suffered transphobic violence, hate crime and discrimination in all areas of their lives because they are all undocumented cases ignored within a system for cisgendered "men" or "women" only.
Reports and feedback on this transfeminist action can be found on:
Manchester Indymedia:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/manchester/
Trans Youth Network:
http://www.transyouth.org
G7UK Blog:
http://www.g7uk.com/
Get Bent Manchester:
http://www.get-bent-manchester.com
Quit moochin' on't'interweb, we'll see you on the streets, lovely people of all genders XXX
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Master's House
Everyone needs to read this, because it is MADE OF AWESOME.
To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.
There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.
The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.
I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...
Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...
To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.
There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.
The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.
I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...
Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Visibility and/or objectification: images of disabled people in books and media
I was at a friend's house recently and, with my friend and her partner, rather randomly looking through some books that were lying around her house. Two of the books had photos of disabled people in them, and it got me thinking about images of disabled/impaired people, visibility and objectification...
The first book was a university biology textbook on human genetics. Sections of the book discussed various congenital impairments and the genetics behind them, and had accompanying photos of people with those impairments. One was a picture of a baby with Cri du Chat syndrome, which is caused by a partial deletion of a chromosome (and gets its name because babies with it have a distinctive cry which, apparently, sounds like a cat). Alongside the picture of the baby was the remark that, although "mentally retarded", people with Cri du Chat syndrome could, with "proper support", develop intelligence "in the trainable range".
On the next page was a discussion of Down's syndrome, which is caused by trisomy, or having an "extra", third copy of chromosome 23. The accompanying photo was labelled as being of "a child with Down's syndrome"; in actual fact, it looked to be of a young woman in roughly her early 20s. She was dressed in some sort of sporting gear (probably a winter sport like skiing?), and proudly holding a trophy for winning a sporting competition.
The other book was a very silly book supposedly about cryptozoology (if it wasn't that one, it was a very similar one), which was basically a complete work of fiction presented as a "science" book, probably mostly aimed at kids, featuring pseudo-scientific depictions (with fake Latin names, etc) of mythological creatures like centaurs, dragons, winged horses, merpeople, werewolves, unicorns, etc. (Note that cryptozoology is actually real, and a perseveration of mine, and generally deals with somewhat more plausible putative creatures than the above (well, at least when crazy US creationists aren't trying to hijack it)- this speech by Darren Naish is a good introduction to it...)
On the intro page to the "Hominids" chapter (which, rather than dealing with relatively plausible hominid cryptids such as the Almas or the Orang Pendek, was about such creatures as goblins, giants and fairies), however, despite the premise being that it was about fictional non-human species, there were several photos of disabled humans: several people of restricted growth, Joseph Merrick the "Elephant Man", and one of the "Rat Children of Pakistan", who are actually children who were deliberately physically and mentally impaired in order to exploit them as beggars.
All these portrayals are problematic IMO. Cri du Chat syndrome is one of many syndromes which i've only ever seen pictures or descriptions of babies/small children with, despite the fact that people with it grow to become adults. This kind of thing is quite common with regard to autism as well; lots of stuff in the media about "autistic children", but a distinct absence of autistic adults, as if the assumption is that disabled children either don't live to adulthood, or somehow miraculously become non-disabled on reaching adulthood; it also contributes to the perception of disabled adults as some sort of "eternal children". This perception is shown incredibly clearly by the labelling of the photo of the woman with Down's syndrome as "a child with Down's syndrome" - congenital impairment is assumed to be a property (only) of children to such an extent that a person with a congenital impairment, regardless of their actual age, is automatically assumed to be a child. So prevalent is the reference only to children in medical/scientific articles about congenital impairments that i sometimes wonder if the thought of the existence of adults with such impairments has ever crossed the minds of the writers of such articles.
The phrase "trainable range" is one that makes me shudder. A search for "trainable" on Wikipedia redirects to the article titled "Mental retardation", despite the word not being used in that article. I believe that, at one time, people with mental disabilities were classified by the authorities into "trainables" and "untrainables", with the former regarded as being capable of training for employment (in positions at the bottom of the workplace heirarchy, doing menial work and often paid far less than a living wage, if anything at all), and the latter regarded as incapable of any meaningful learning or contribution to society, and thus "warehoused" in institutions. (This, in fact, parallels current UK government policy, as laid out in the Welfare Reform Act, which similarly seeks to classify disabled people as either "capable of work", and thus to be forced into any job, however unsuitable, with the threat of destitution, or "incapable of work", and thus by implication incapable of meaningful membership in society and deserving of social exclusion.) The "trainable"/"untrainable" categorisation starkly illustrates the values of a society which defines people by their capacity for economic exploitation, and which considers it appropriate for disabled people to be coercively "trained" to accept a prescribed social role regardless of their own desires and aspirations.
The fact that images of visibly disabled people are considered an appropriate introduction for a fictional classification of mythological "hominid species" clearly shows to what extent disabled people are considered "Other", objects of fascination yet not of empathy or identification, not fully human; exhibits, just as "exotic" animals are, in a zoo or a freak show (a subject i touched on earlier here) - indeed, it is implied that the "dwarves" whose photo captions say they were exhibited in circuses and at the courts of European royalty are the same as the fictional "dwarves" described a few pages later as a species of Homo with non-human physical and personality traits based on the portrayals of dwarf races in fantasy (Tolkien, etc). "Elephant Man" and "Rat Children" are, of course, names which seek to compare and associate disabled people with animals and portray them as some sort of hybrid or intermediate between humans and animals, definitely not fully human; so, arguably, is "Cri du Chat syndrome".
(Although i know some people of restricted growth use it as a self-definition, i find the term "dwarf" very difficult to use to describe real people, because i can't help it making me think of them as living in mines underneath a mountain, having huge beards and Viking-style helmets, making magical artefacts out of gold and having wars with elves, orcs, etc...)
The writers of the fictional cryptozoology book probably didn't think of the possibility of causing offence to, or furthering negative stereotypes of, disabled people when they used those photos or descriptions. The writers of the genetics textbook almost certainly thought they were portraying disabled people in an ideologically neutral way, as a matter of science, not of culture or politics. However, such images cannot help but objectify and reinforce stereotypical perceptions of disabled people.
Of course, with many if not all of these types of images, i can't help feeling ambiguous; there are some arguable positives to them, despite the negatives. It's good, IMO, that impairments are part of a biological education, and that people have at least a basic knowledge of different impairments and how they affect people (as long as that knowledge is placed appropriately within a social context) - the social model does not, or at least should not, deny or ignore impairment, and understanding of impairment is, IMO, necessary (if not sufficient) for understanding of disabling barriers.
Just being aware that different kinds of human beings exist is, IMO, a good thing, and i think that some sort of categorisation of types of human difference is something that the human mind finds necessary. The image of the young woman with Down's syndrome, if taken by itself without the inaccurate caption calling her a "child", is pretty unambiguously positive; it shows a disabled person looking strong, independent and confident, and proud of her achievement in something that she is a success at. (Admittedly it does reinforce the association of disabled people with sport as primary achievement, which is something i have problems with, but that's a critique i'll have to save for another blog post...)
Even the "freakshow" images of disabled people alongside mythical animals can, IMO, be reclaimed in certain ways; as people proud of and (in many cases) choosing to earn a living from visible difference; "we're here, we're biodiverse, get used to it". (Eli Clare has a great chapter on this topic in Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, which i'll have to return to in future posts - of course, there is also Tod Browning's magnificent film Freaks, which is justly regarded as a classic by many in the disability movement.)
Kay Olson at The Gimp Parade recently posted about a story that made it into the UK mainstream media about a woman from China who refused a disability pension despite having "her feet attached backwards" (actually turned upside down - i suspect she has a form of arthrogryposis), which is typical of many stories about people with impairments which get featured in the media as "weird news" or "quirky" stories (I'm surprised it didn't make it to the Fortean Times breaking news column, which is my source for most of these types of stories) - another recent-ish one was that of the "families who walk on all fours" in Turkey and Iraq.
On the one hand, these are clearly voyeuristic, objectifying stories; on the other, there are differing views about objectification, ranging from the view that it is always and only negative to the view that it can, if freely chosen, be something desirable and positive (these being in reference to sexual/gender objectification, but IMO applicable to any other kind). I am torn between thinking "this is non-news if it were not for the factor of a "freakish" impaired body for "normal" people to gaze at", and being pleased at visible difference being portrayed at all, and the always-welcome illustration that there are more ways than the "standard" way to be human. Is the positivity or negativity of possible interpretations located in the creator(s) of the portrayal itself, or in the mind of the person observing it?
I'm not sure. (I thought i might have had a conclusion there for a second, but i obviously don't...) I do know that this is both an incredibly important (from a cultural/sociological point of view), yet much neglected, and a (probably inevitably) very much essentially contested area. I'd be really interested in other disabled peoples' (especially those whose impairments are much more visually obvious than my own) opinions...
The first book was a university biology textbook on human genetics. Sections of the book discussed various congenital impairments and the genetics behind them, and had accompanying photos of people with those impairments. One was a picture of a baby with Cri du Chat syndrome, which is caused by a partial deletion of a chromosome (and gets its name because babies with it have a distinctive cry which, apparently, sounds like a cat). Alongside the picture of the baby was the remark that, although "mentally retarded", people with Cri du Chat syndrome could, with "proper support", develop intelligence "in the trainable range".
On the next page was a discussion of Down's syndrome, which is caused by trisomy, or having an "extra", third copy of chromosome 23. The accompanying photo was labelled as being of "a child with Down's syndrome"; in actual fact, it looked to be of a young woman in roughly her early 20s. She was dressed in some sort of sporting gear (probably a winter sport like skiing?), and proudly holding a trophy for winning a sporting competition.
The other book was a very silly book supposedly about cryptozoology (if it wasn't that one, it was a very similar one), which was basically a complete work of fiction presented as a "science" book, probably mostly aimed at kids, featuring pseudo-scientific depictions (with fake Latin names, etc) of mythological creatures like centaurs, dragons, winged horses, merpeople, werewolves, unicorns, etc. (Note that cryptozoology is actually real, and a perseveration of mine, and generally deals with somewhat more plausible putative creatures than the above (well, at least when crazy US creationists aren't trying to hijack it)- this speech by Darren Naish is a good introduction to it...)
On the intro page to the "Hominids" chapter (which, rather than dealing with relatively plausible hominid cryptids such as the Almas or the Orang Pendek, was about such creatures as goblins, giants and fairies), however, despite the premise being that it was about fictional non-human species, there were several photos of disabled humans: several people of restricted growth, Joseph Merrick the "Elephant Man", and one of the "Rat Children of Pakistan", who are actually children who were deliberately physically and mentally impaired in order to exploit them as beggars.
All these portrayals are problematic IMO. Cri du Chat syndrome is one of many syndromes which i've only ever seen pictures or descriptions of babies/small children with, despite the fact that people with it grow to become adults. This kind of thing is quite common with regard to autism as well; lots of stuff in the media about "autistic children", but a distinct absence of autistic adults, as if the assumption is that disabled children either don't live to adulthood, or somehow miraculously become non-disabled on reaching adulthood; it also contributes to the perception of disabled adults as some sort of "eternal children". This perception is shown incredibly clearly by the labelling of the photo of the woman with Down's syndrome as "a child with Down's syndrome" - congenital impairment is assumed to be a property (only) of children to such an extent that a person with a congenital impairment, regardless of their actual age, is automatically assumed to be a child. So prevalent is the reference only to children in medical/scientific articles about congenital impairments that i sometimes wonder if the thought of the existence of adults with such impairments has ever crossed the minds of the writers of such articles.
The phrase "trainable range" is one that makes me shudder. A search for "trainable" on Wikipedia redirects to the article titled "Mental retardation", despite the word not being used in that article. I believe that, at one time, people with mental disabilities were classified by the authorities into "trainables" and "untrainables", with the former regarded as being capable of training for employment (in positions at the bottom of the workplace heirarchy, doing menial work and often paid far less than a living wage, if anything at all), and the latter regarded as incapable of any meaningful learning or contribution to society, and thus "warehoused" in institutions. (This, in fact, parallels current UK government policy, as laid out in the Welfare Reform Act, which similarly seeks to classify disabled people as either "capable of work", and thus to be forced into any job, however unsuitable, with the threat of destitution, or "incapable of work", and thus by implication incapable of meaningful membership in society and deserving of social exclusion.) The "trainable"/"untrainable" categorisation starkly illustrates the values of a society which defines people by their capacity for economic exploitation, and which considers it appropriate for disabled people to be coercively "trained" to accept a prescribed social role regardless of their own desires and aspirations.
The fact that images of visibly disabled people are considered an appropriate introduction for a fictional classification of mythological "hominid species" clearly shows to what extent disabled people are considered "Other", objects of fascination yet not of empathy or identification, not fully human; exhibits, just as "exotic" animals are, in a zoo or a freak show (a subject i touched on earlier here) - indeed, it is implied that the "dwarves" whose photo captions say they were exhibited in circuses and at the courts of European royalty are the same as the fictional "dwarves" described a few pages later as a species of Homo with non-human physical and personality traits based on the portrayals of dwarf races in fantasy (Tolkien, etc). "Elephant Man" and "Rat Children" are, of course, names which seek to compare and associate disabled people with animals and portray them as some sort of hybrid or intermediate between humans and animals, definitely not fully human; so, arguably, is "Cri du Chat syndrome".
(Although i know some people of restricted growth use it as a self-definition, i find the term "dwarf" very difficult to use to describe real people, because i can't help it making me think of them as living in mines underneath a mountain, having huge beards and Viking-style helmets, making magical artefacts out of gold and having wars with elves, orcs, etc...)
The writers of the fictional cryptozoology book probably didn't think of the possibility of causing offence to, or furthering negative stereotypes of, disabled people when they used those photos or descriptions. The writers of the genetics textbook almost certainly thought they were portraying disabled people in an ideologically neutral way, as a matter of science, not of culture or politics. However, such images cannot help but objectify and reinforce stereotypical perceptions of disabled people.
Of course, with many if not all of these types of images, i can't help feeling ambiguous; there are some arguable positives to them, despite the negatives. It's good, IMO, that impairments are part of a biological education, and that people have at least a basic knowledge of different impairments and how they affect people (as long as that knowledge is placed appropriately within a social context) - the social model does not, or at least should not, deny or ignore impairment, and understanding of impairment is, IMO, necessary (if not sufficient) for understanding of disabling barriers.
Just being aware that different kinds of human beings exist is, IMO, a good thing, and i think that some sort of categorisation of types of human difference is something that the human mind finds necessary. The image of the young woman with Down's syndrome, if taken by itself without the inaccurate caption calling her a "child", is pretty unambiguously positive; it shows a disabled person looking strong, independent and confident, and proud of her achievement in something that she is a success at. (Admittedly it does reinforce the association of disabled people with sport as primary achievement, which is something i have problems with, but that's a critique i'll have to save for another blog post...)
Even the "freakshow" images of disabled people alongside mythical animals can, IMO, be reclaimed in certain ways; as people proud of and (in many cases) choosing to earn a living from visible difference; "we're here, we're biodiverse, get used to it". (Eli Clare has a great chapter on this topic in Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, which i'll have to return to in future posts - of course, there is also Tod Browning's magnificent film Freaks, which is justly regarded as a classic by many in the disability movement.)
Kay Olson at The Gimp Parade recently posted about a story that made it into the UK mainstream media about a woman from China who refused a disability pension despite having "her feet attached backwards" (actually turned upside down - i suspect she has a form of arthrogryposis), which is typical of many stories about people with impairments which get featured in the media as "weird news" or "quirky" stories (I'm surprised it didn't make it to the Fortean Times breaking news column, which is my source for most of these types of stories) - another recent-ish one was that of the "families who walk on all fours" in Turkey and Iraq.
On the one hand, these are clearly voyeuristic, objectifying stories; on the other, there are differing views about objectification, ranging from the view that it is always and only negative to the view that it can, if freely chosen, be something desirable and positive (these being in reference to sexual/gender objectification, but IMO applicable to any other kind). I am torn between thinking "this is non-news if it were not for the factor of a "freakish" impaired body for "normal" people to gaze at", and being pleased at visible difference being portrayed at all, and the always-welcome illustration that there are more ways than the "standard" way to be human. Is the positivity or negativity of possible interpretations located in the creator(s) of the portrayal itself, or in the mind of the person observing it?
I'm not sure. (I thought i might have had a conclusion there for a second, but i obviously don't...) I do know that this is both an incredibly important (from a cultural/sociological point of view), yet much neglected, and a (probably inevitably) very much essentially contested area. I'd be really interested in other disabled peoples' (especially those whose impairments are much more visually obvious than my own) opinions...
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Trans liberation and disability liberation: a necessary alliance
Today is (or, technically, yesterday was, as it's now about 4am here in the UK) Transgender Day of Remembrance, "set aside to memorialise those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice". Several bloggers I read wrote moving and powerful posts about this, which inspired me to write about what I believe to be both a natural and necessary alliance between disability and transgender issues...
One of my closest friends is a trans woman. It was her coming out as trans (at which point in fact we were not particularly close friends), and the ensuing conversations between us about identity (both gender and otherwise), disability (she also has a physical impairment), the psychiatric/mental health system, childhood experiences and other stuff, that led me to seek diagnosis for Asperger's at the age of 22, and ultimately to embrace "disabled" as an identity.
While I would never claim to appropriate her experience, there were levels of, particularly childhood, experience on which I connected more with her than with anyone I had ever known before - conversations which lasted from early afternoon until sunrise the next morning, and which felt like the deepest I had ever had in my life. Essentially, the experience that we both shared was that of having been brought up by (suburban, working-class-but-educated) parents under the assumption that each of us was a "normal boy", when in fact both of us were something else - an experience which is difficult to explain in many ways, because it is just as harmful and destructive as the experience of deliberate abuse, yet those responsible for it were acting not from any kind of malice but from a completely genuine desire to do good.
In fact, this is a defining characteristic of many if not most disabled people's lives (although particularly, specifically so for those whose impairment or other physical or mental "difference" is not diagnosed until adulthood) - false assumptions about who and what we are, resulting in well-meaning treatment that is as harmful as, or even more harmful than, malicious treatment would be. It is an experience that can be survived, even triumphed over, but not without scars - in some cases physically as a result of either "self-harm" or unnecessary and therefore harmful medical treatments, in pretty much all cases metaphorically in the form of reactive depression and PTSD. (Show me either a congenitally disabled person or a trans person who doesn't have PTSD, and I'll show you someone who must have been brought up in Utopia.)
I have seen my friend grow into a beautiful woman, while she has had to see me (in many ways) "regress" or "deteriorate". I have seen her grow into herself, while I am still not sure if I truly have a "self" to grow into. I have seen her dysphoria turned, quite literally, into euphoria by a simple little pill (the only medical-model solution for depression I have ever seen that actually worked, which makes a mockery of some so-called feminists' ideas about transitioning as a form of "self-hate" or "self-mutilation"), while there has been no such easy solution for me. This cannot have been easy for her: yet, through all of it, she has treated me continuously and consistently as a friend and an equal. There is no better definition of a friend, comrade, ally.
I believe that the disability rights/liberation movement and the trans* rights/liberation movement are natural allies, even if many within both of them have never considered that alliance. Both are about acceptance rather than elimination of physical and mental difference. Both are about freedom of choice, the inalienable right of the individual to have self-determination over, and to be regarded as the person with the best knowledge of, hir own brain and body. Both are about the depathologisation of that which the establishment persists in considering pathological. Both intersect with feminism in incredibly exciting ways which can enable feminism (if feminism lets them) to get beyond problems and dichotomies which it has struggled with for generations (see FRIDA and The Transfeminist Manifesto (PDF), and also, for intersections of both movements, the very awesome Emi Koyama). Both are about resistance against a patronising, patriarchal, paternalistic medical establishment which claims to know our bodies and minds better than we know them ourselves. Both are about human biodiversity.
There is considerable overlap, also, in the area of intersex conditions, which can be regarded both as physical impairment (and are often accompanied by, or "comorbid" with, other physical or mental impairments) and as a gender identity issue; Emi Koyama has written (although I haven't read it) a lecture with the awesome title of "Intersex at the Intersection of Queerness & Disability Theories". There is strong evidence that many people labelled "transsexual" may actually have one or more undiagnosed intersex conditions. The routine mutilation, often without their parents' either consent or knowledge, of intersex babies to make them "conform" to one binary gender or the other (which, of course, if the doctors get it wrong, leads to gender dysphoria and thus transsexualism) closely parallels the non-consensual sterilisation and other surgical mutilations of physically and/or mentally disabled children.
The long and sad history of trans* people murdered because of transphobia, and the horrifyingly widespread belief that those murders were justified because of those people's gender identity, is paralleled by the equally long and sad history of disabled people murdered (often under the guise of "mercy killing") by family members, "carers", medical professionals and institutions, and the similarly horrifyingly widespread belief that those killings were justified because of the victims' impairment or disability. Both groups were among the first to be killed (before Jews or any other ethnic minority) in the Holocaust.
This is why I think that it's absolutely awesome that disability bloggers such as Elizabeth McClung and Trinity have blogged about Transgender Day of Remembrance, and that Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia has posted a link to this video by Amanda Baggs. I would absolutely love to see a movement which actively brings together the disability and trans* movements (along with all kinds of other diversity-related movements), as "the human biodiversity movement", but in this lifetime, the disability movement and the trans* movement recognising and appreciating one another as allies is enough. Well, in trying to change the world, there's never really such a thing as "enough", but you know what I mean...
Transfeminist blogger Little Light wrote a truly awesome piece called "the seam of skin and scales", in which she declared "It is time for a feminism of the monstrous". While on an immediate level it's about her own identity and experience as a transsexual feminist, there is a hell of a lot in it that disabled people can equally well relate to. Disabled people too have been treated or regarded as monsters, freaks, subhumans, deviants, abominations, angels, demons, changelings, witches. Her writing sparked off a blog war with certain dogmatic "radical feminist" (IMO, their position is neither) bloggers who accused her of plagiarism (with no realistic case whatsoever).
What this is rooted in is the refusal of certain strands of feminism to accept trans* people's realities, in the same way that some of the "straw man" style critiques of disability rights are based on a refusal to accept disabled people's realities. In both cases, the issue is complicated by some well-meaning defenders of inclusion (consciously or unconsciously) embracing in reality the irrational positions that their respective movements have been stereotyped as holding.
Transphobic "feminists" tend to advance the position that transitioning is a "choice", and one which is harmful to the cause of feminism by "reinforcing feminine stereotypes" and/or "men invading women's spaces" in the case of trans women, or by "deserting womanhood to get male privilege" in the case of trans men. This - apart from having no relationship at all to reality except in the minds of people who have almost certainly never even knowingly spoken to a trans* person - completely ignores trans people's lived realities, of, for example, having known they were girls/boys from as early as they were capable of coherent thought (despite physical "evidence" of the opposite), or of having been continuously depressed to a suicidal extent (without anything other than gender dysphoria for that to be reactive to), along with other symptoms including physical pain, to be near-instantly "cured" on starting gender reassignment treatment. Trans*-ness is attributed solely to socio-political factors and even the possibility of its being the way a person was born is excluded without consideration. (For an example, see Sheila Jeffreys' claims here.)
(This is, of course, like all identity issues a complex and contested area - I have encountered (albeit only online and not in "real life") trans* people who claim that they did "choose" to transition, and did not "always" experience gender dysphoria, and I certainly don't wish to deny their realities. Ultimately, I don't think it matters if someone did choose their gender identity - I wrote about the same issue with regard to sexual orientation here... however, no one has the right to, or honestly can, deny the existence of those whose gender identity is, to them, innate.)
I see similarities here to a "straw man" version of the social model of disability, which is often advanced in order to deny it or reduce it to absurdity - i.e., that the social model supposedly states that impairment does not exist, or does not matter at all, and thus denies the reality of people whose impairments cannot be (fully) compensated for by social change. The earliest originators of the social model, such as Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, shared with Marxists (from whom their critique was largely derived, albeit IMO going beyond Marxism in several crucial ways) and second wave feminists a focus on the sociological sphere and how it, rather than nature, was the source of many forms of oppression and injustice, patriarchy and disablism among them. Thus the early social model theorists did not write much about impairment, because the point of their writing was to take the focus away from impairment; however, there is nowhere that I know of, even in Finkelstein, that they deny its reality. However, this "straw man" causes many people, including disabled people, to reject the social model of disability altogether - much as the transphobia of much second-wave/radical feminism causes many trans* people to reject feminism altogether.
(On a more impairment -spec
One of my closest friends is a trans woman. It was her coming out as trans (at which point in fact we were not particularly close friends), and the ensuing conversations between us about identity (both gender and otherwise), disability (she also has a physical impairment), the psychiatric/mental health system, childhood experiences and other stuff, that led me to seek diagnosis for Asperger's at the age of 22, and ultimately to embrace "disabled" as an identity.
While I would never claim to appropriate her experience, there were levels of, particularly childhood, experience on which I connected more with her than with anyone I had ever known before - conversations which lasted from early afternoon until sunrise the next morning, and which felt like the deepest I had ever had in my life. Essentially, the experience that we both shared was that of having been brought up by (suburban, working-class-but-educated) parents under the assumption that each of us was a "normal boy", when in fact both of us were something else - an experience which is difficult to explain in many ways, because it is just as harmful and destructive as the experience of deliberate abuse, yet those responsible for it were acting not from any kind of malice but from a completely genuine desire to do good.
In fact, this is a defining characteristic of many if not most disabled people's lives (although particularly, specifically so for those whose impairment or other physical or mental "difference" is not diagnosed until adulthood) - false assumptions about who and what we are, resulting in well-meaning treatment that is as harmful as, or even more harmful than, malicious treatment would be. It is an experience that can be survived, even triumphed over, but not without scars - in some cases physically as a result of either "self-harm" or unnecessary and therefore harmful medical treatments, in pretty much all cases metaphorically in the form of reactive depression and PTSD. (Show me either a congenitally disabled person or a trans person who doesn't have PTSD, and I'll show you someone who must have been brought up in Utopia.)
I have seen my friend grow into a beautiful woman, while she has had to see me (in many ways) "regress" or "deteriorate". I have seen her grow into herself, while I am still not sure if I truly have a "self" to grow into. I have seen her dysphoria turned, quite literally, into euphoria by a simple little pill (the only medical-model solution for depression I have ever seen that actually worked, which makes a mockery of some so-called feminists' ideas about transitioning as a form of "self-hate" or "self-mutilation"), while there has been no such easy solution for me. This cannot have been easy for her: yet, through all of it, she has treated me continuously and consistently as a friend and an equal. There is no better definition of a friend, comrade, ally.
I believe that the disability rights/liberation movement and the trans* rights/liberation movement are natural allies, even if many within both of them have never considered that alliance. Both are about acceptance rather than elimination of physical and mental difference. Both are about freedom of choice, the inalienable right of the individual to have self-determination over, and to be regarded as the person with the best knowledge of, hir own brain and body. Both are about the depathologisation of that which the establishment persists in considering pathological. Both intersect with feminism in incredibly exciting ways which can enable feminism (if feminism lets them) to get beyond problems and dichotomies which it has struggled with for generations (see FRIDA and The Transfeminist Manifesto (PDF), and also, for intersections of both movements, the very awesome Emi Koyama). Both are about resistance against a patronising, patriarchal, paternalistic medical establishment which claims to know our bodies and minds better than we know them ourselves. Both are about human biodiversity.
There is considerable overlap, also, in the area of intersex conditions, which can be regarded both as physical impairment (and are often accompanied by, or "comorbid" with, other physical or mental impairments) and as a gender identity issue; Emi Koyama has written (although I haven't read it) a lecture with the awesome title of "Intersex at the Intersection of Queerness & Disability Theories". There is strong evidence that many people labelled "transsexual" may actually have one or more undiagnosed intersex conditions. The routine mutilation, often without their parents' either consent or knowledge, of intersex babies to make them "conform" to one binary gender or the other (which, of course, if the doctors get it wrong, leads to gender dysphoria and thus transsexualism) closely parallels the non-consensual sterilisation and other surgical mutilations of physically and/or mentally disabled children.
The long and sad history of trans* people murdered because of transphobia, and the horrifyingly widespread belief that those murders were justified because of those people's gender identity, is paralleled by the equally long and sad history of disabled people murdered (often under the guise of "mercy killing") by family members, "carers", medical professionals and institutions, and the similarly horrifyingly widespread belief that those killings were justified because of the victims' impairment or disability. Both groups were among the first to be killed (before Jews or any other ethnic minority) in the Holocaust.
This is why I think that it's absolutely awesome that disability bloggers such as Elizabeth McClung and Trinity have blogged about Transgender Day of Remembrance, and that Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia has posted a link to this video by Amanda Baggs. I would absolutely love to see a movement which actively brings together the disability and trans* movements (along with all kinds of other diversity-related movements), as "the human biodiversity movement", but in this lifetime, the disability movement and the trans* movement recognising and appreciating one another as allies is enough. Well, in trying to change the world, there's never really such a thing as "enough", but you know what I mean...
Transfeminist blogger Little Light wrote a truly awesome piece called "the seam of skin and scales", in which she declared "It is time for a feminism of the monstrous". While on an immediate level it's about her own identity and experience as a transsexual feminist, there is a hell of a lot in it that disabled people can equally well relate to. Disabled people too have been treated or regarded as monsters, freaks, subhumans, deviants, abominations, angels, demons, changelings, witches. Her writing sparked off a blog war with certain dogmatic "radical feminist" (IMO, their position is neither) bloggers who accused her of plagiarism (with no realistic case whatsoever).
What this is rooted in is the refusal of certain strands of feminism to accept trans* people's realities, in the same way that some of the "straw man" style critiques of disability rights are based on a refusal to accept disabled people's realities. In both cases, the issue is complicated by some well-meaning defenders of inclusion (consciously or unconsciously) embracing in reality the irrational positions that their respective movements have been stereotyped as holding.
Transphobic "feminists" tend to advance the position that transitioning is a "choice", and one which is harmful to the cause of feminism by "reinforcing feminine stereotypes" and/or "men invading women's spaces" in the case of trans women, or by "deserting womanhood to get male privilege" in the case of trans men. This - apart from having no relationship at all to reality except in the minds of people who have almost certainly never even knowingly spoken to a trans* person - completely ignores trans people's lived realities, of, for example, having known they were girls/boys from as early as they were capable of coherent thought (despite physical "evidence" of the opposite), or of having been continuously depressed to a suicidal extent (without anything other than gender dysphoria for that to be reactive to), along with other symptoms including physical pain, to be near-instantly "cured" on starting gender reassignment treatment. Trans*-ness is attributed solely to socio-political factors and even the possibility of its being the way a person was born is excluded without consideration. (For an example, see Sheila Jeffreys' claims here.)
(This is, of course, like all identity issues a complex and contested area - I have encountered (albeit only online and not in "real life") trans* people who claim that they did "choose" to transition, and did not "always" experience gender dysphoria, and I certainly don't wish to deny their realities. Ultimately, I don't think it matters if someone did choose their gender identity - I wrote about the same issue with regard to sexual orientation here... however, no one has the right to, or honestly can, deny the existence of those whose gender identity is, to them, innate.)
I see similarities here to a "straw man" version of the social model of disability, which is often advanced in order to deny it or reduce it to absurdity - i.e., that the social model supposedly states that impairment does not exist, or does not matter at all, and thus denies the reality of people whose impairments cannot be (fully) compensated for by social change. The earliest originators of the social model, such as Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, shared with Marxists (from whom their critique was largely derived, albeit IMO going beyond Marxism in several crucial ways) and second wave feminists a focus on the sociological sphere and how it, rather than nature, was the source of many forms of oppression and injustice, patriarchy and disablism among them. Thus the early social model theorists did not write much about impairment, because the point of their writing was to take the focus away from impairment; however, there is nowhere that I know of, even in Finkelstein, that they deny its reality. However, this "straw man" causes many people, including disabled people, to reject the social model of disability altogether - much as the transphobia of much second-wave/radical feminism causes many trans* people to reject feminism altogether.
(On a more impairment -spec