Today I was collaborating with a couple of other local disability activists on writing an introductory article about disability hate crime (taking as its main reference point the recent UKDPC Briefing on Hate Crime, but simplifying and distilling it with a local focus, and also addressing the non-recognition of disability-related hate crime as such by police and other official agencies). The debate got me thinking about the reasons for this non-recognition...
Hate crime against disabled people, however defined, is a HUGE problem - in the UK, the recent murder of Brent Martin is a recent example, and there are innumerable other horrific incidents - just look at FRIDA's archives of disability news items for examples. Yet, somehow, there seems to be a reluctance, not only within the police and the political establishment, but even within “left-wing” or generally anti-oppressive discourse, to acknowledge that hate crime against disabled people even exists...
Why is this? One reason, IMO, is that the prevailing paradigm of what “hate crime” is is based on a certain template of “typical” hate crime - in the UK at least, primarily racist and, probably to a slightly lesser extent, homophobic/transphobic hate crime.
These sorts of hate crime are characterised by the “hate” element being openly stated and explicit, and by the people or groups of people involved in such crimes generally having a consciously bigoted agenda - they believe their racist or homo/transphobic actions are justified by their own prejudiced value systems, and consciously see the minorities they attack as an enemy. Often they are part of more or less organised ideological groupings, such as fascists or religious fundamentalists.
This kind of hate crime is pretty easy to recognise - graffiti using insulting terms for the minority groups using targeted, often saying things like “[group X] out” or “kill all [group X]”, attacks by groups which are generally pre-planned, involving gangs of racists/homophobes/etc getting together with the deliberate intent of attacking either a specific individual(s) or members of their target group in general (eg, by going to an area where members of that group live, or a social venue where they tend to go with the intention to vandalise or attack people).
With disability hate crime, it tends not quite to work the same way. The thugs who beat Brent Martin to death (whose sentences were just reduced by an appeal judge) were not members of a fascist group, followers of any religion that believes disability is evidence of sin, or followers of the likes of Peter Singer (who believes disabled people should be killed at birth). They had not decided that day that they were going to find and beat up a disabled person, nor, probably, did they consciously perceive disabled people as their “enemies”. They did, however, kill him because they thought that it was socially acceptable to cause pain and/or harm to a disabled person simply for amusement - in other words, they did not see Brent Martin as a fellow human being, but as an object of scorn and ridicule.
From some viewpoints, this attitude is even worse than that of conscious, explicit hatred - I would certainly rather be perceived as an enemy (with the modicum of respect that contains in being seen as at least potentially dangerous, and therefore having some agency), the target of a tribal or holy war, than as a mere object, so far from an equal that hurting or killing “it” is no more than sport . But, in the minds of many, it simply isn't seen as “hatred” - or, as sexual violence was and is, is seen as “personal” rather than “political”, evidence of individual cruelty, but not of societal prejudice or larger underlying values.
Even further from recognition as “hate crime” is the abuse of disabled people - up to and including the killing of disabled children - within the family. Of course, the existing paradigm of hate crime finds it hard to recognise in an intra-family context, as members of families are generally of the same race as each other (and, if it's a mixed-race family, they're very unlikely to be racists) - homophobic and transphobic hate crime does occur within families, but I think it has some of the same problems of recognition there as disablist hate crime does.
This is even harder to see for what it is because torturous “treatments” - which in any other context would constitute assault or worse - see for example here - are often given to disabled children (and some adults, especially if they are learning disabled) supposedly “for their own good”, and even sometimes by or at the request of medical professionals. In some of these cases, such as the torture of autistic children by “chelation”, the violence is motivated by a desire to “cure” the impairment or difference - which, while not consciously perceived as such, certainly implies a desire for a category of people not to exist, which I think “hate” is definitely a reasonable definition for...
In the most extreme cases of all - those of the killing of children by their parents or “carers”, such as the cases of Tracy Latimer or Katie McCarron - the murderers actually assert that their act of killing is motivated not by hate, but by love - in that they believe it is a “loving” and “merciful” act to kill their child rather than let them live as a disabled person. In this case, the underlying hate of disabled people is so deep that it's almost impossible to get through to people that it is hate - but what other than hate of disabled people could underlie the belief that a person's existence is, purely because of their impairment, “worse than death”, and what other than total disregard for their autonomy, and thus status as a human being, could underlie the belief that their own opinion on whether their life is worth living can be totally disregarded?
This is part of why I am wary of “one-size-fits-all” approaches to oppression - while there certainly are many ways in which disablism is analogous to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc, it isn't perfectly analogous, and shouldn't be treated as if it is. In particular, the whole “pity”, “care”, hate-masquerading-as-love paradigm is, I think, if not peculiar to disablism then certainly far more characteristic of it than of the other prejudices/oppressions it's most frequently compared to, while disablism tends to manifest itself as open enmity much less than the others do. (If anything, in terms of racism, the kind of disablist bigotry that is prevalent now is less like most contemporary racism than it is like the kind of “white man's burden”, “children of a larger growth” paternalistic racism that was the paradigmatic form in Empire times.)
Of course, I have fairly major problems with the whole concept of “hate crime” in itself - not least because I have major problems with its component concept of “crime” as a whole (which concept, IMO, brackets together at least 3 extremely different categories of acts, purely by the almost completely arbitrary fact that, in the current political system, they are codified as “illegal”... but that's a topic for another post), but also because, even when the acts described above are recognised as “hate crime”, it fails even to touch the institutionalised social oppression of disabled people - in residential homes, “special” schools, hospitals, and the “social care” system as a whole - which constitutes a “crime”, in terms of abuses of disabled people's human rights, far bigger than that of any individual (just as, for example, the institutionally racist oppression of asylum seekers in immigration detention centres (which closely resemble “care homes”, possibly even more so than they do prisons, in the way that they are run and administered) is a far greater “crime” than the actions of any small-scale gang of racist thugs).
However, the point of this post is really that I think disablism is, often if not always, more difficult to recognise for what it is than most other prejudices and oppressive systems - and not just because it has been recognised for less time, or because the disabled people's liberation movement is “behind” other liberation movements (in chronological or progressivist terms), but because the forms that it takes are actually substantially different, and, in some ways, IMO harder to recognise precisely because they are more deeply ingrained in the unconscious foundations of “Western culture” - in assumptions so deep that they aren't even consciously noticed.
What this means for the disabled people's liberation movement, I'm not quite certain (apart from that, possibly, too-direct analogies to the experiences of other oppressed peoples may, in some circumstances, be counterproductive) - but one thing that strikes me is that that implies the disabled people's liberation movement has the potential for a deeper and more radical undermining of currently-hegemonic cultural values than perhaps any other movement. That, however, is definitely a topic that needs another post...
Showing posts with label social movements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social movements. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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...
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Camp for Climate Action: a (hopefully) somewhat more coherent post
OK, so i've come down from the poetics a bit ;)
The Camp for Climate Action 2007 (or just Climate Camp) was an awesome experience. Over 1000 people coming together, through a leaderless, decentralised and locality-based autonomous process of organisation, for a week of low-impact DIY living, high-quality climate science discussion, workshops both theoretical and practical, and high-impact direct action.
I'm going to write a few more posts about specific events and issues that arose from the Camp, including disability issues, sexism/gender issues, and particular aspects of science/technology debates. Also possibly a few pics, but i only have a few and they're mostly not of the "standard" views of the camp etc (i was working on the presumption that there would be plenty of those on Indymedia and elsewhere, and also a lot of people involved, including myself, weren't particularly keen on being in many photos), but of little things that were of specific interest to me...
It was a huge emotional rollercoaster for me, involving moments of utter hopelessness for both personal and scientific reasons, but overwhelmingly one of the strongest feelings i have ever had of genuine community and being a part of something that has some hope. There were workshops and discussions on all aspects of climate science (possibly somewhat reassuringly, there was not absolute agreement between all scientists involved), and other things as diverse as feminism and practical off-grid electricity.
The camp was organised on a decentralised "neighbourhood" basis, with each area of the country having its own neighbourhood with consensus-based meetings and its own area on site with a kitchen and meeting/chilling space (this was pioneered at the anti-G8 convergence at Stirling in 2005, but, possibly because of the smaller scale, worked a lot better at Climate Camp). This meant that no one group was "the organisers", but everyone could be involved not just in the camp itself, but in the (equally if not far more important) work of building active groups in their own localities...
As well as seriousness there was a real party spirit, with music, comedy, a bar and all kinds of social networking going on (i even managed to meet some other disability activists). The awesome pedal-powered Rinky Dink sound system was a highlight, although its music policy was a little incomprehensible, consisting of heavy dub and jungle, crusty folky-punky stuff, and then... Disney movie theme songs (???)
On Sunday and Monday there was a day of mass direct action involving an all-night blockade of the British Aviation Authority's offices. Police were incredibly heavy handed (not surprisingly for anyone with experience of UK or European activism, but i think this may have been an awereness watershed for the UK media) - I among many others got some rather spectacular bruises to show for it - and the complete contrast between the attitudes to life of the state and the people was shown as overwhelmingly obviously as that betweenm life and death.
Indymedia's report on the Climate Camp is here, there are loads of pics including some awesome art drawings, photos of the big day of action including these, these, these, these and these, photos of the camp itself, and some of the other actions (including daft puddings, red herrings and many more)...
(links now unbroken)
The Camp for Climate Action 2007 (or just Climate Camp) was an awesome experience. Over 1000 people coming together, through a leaderless, decentralised and locality-based autonomous process of organisation, for a week of low-impact DIY living, high-quality climate science discussion, workshops both theoretical and practical, and high-impact direct action.
I'm going to write a few more posts about specific events and issues that arose from the Camp, including disability issues, sexism/gender issues, and particular aspects of science/technology debates. Also possibly a few pics, but i only have a few and they're mostly not of the "standard" views of the camp etc (i was working on the presumption that there would be plenty of those on Indymedia and elsewhere, and also a lot of people involved, including myself, weren't particularly keen on being in many photos), but of little things that were of specific interest to me...
It was a huge emotional rollercoaster for me, involving moments of utter hopelessness for both personal and scientific reasons, but overwhelmingly one of the strongest feelings i have ever had of genuine community and being a part of something that has some hope. There were workshops and discussions on all aspects of climate science (possibly somewhat reassuringly, there was not absolute agreement between all scientists involved), and other things as diverse as feminism and practical off-grid electricity.
The camp was organised on a decentralised "neighbourhood" basis, with each area of the country having its own neighbourhood with consensus-based meetings and its own area on site with a kitchen and meeting/chilling space (this was pioneered at the anti-G8 convergence at Stirling in 2005, but, possibly because of the smaller scale, worked a lot better at Climate Camp). This meant that no one group was "the organisers", but everyone could be involved not just in the camp itself, but in the (equally if not far more important) work of building active groups in their own localities...
As well as seriousness there was a real party spirit, with music, comedy, a bar and all kinds of social networking going on (i even managed to meet some other disability activists). The awesome pedal-powered Rinky Dink sound system was a highlight, although its music policy was a little incomprehensible, consisting of heavy dub and jungle, crusty folky-punky stuff, and then... Disney movie theme songs (???)
On Sunday and Monday there was a day of mass direct action involving an all-night blockade of the British Aviation Authority's offices. Police were incredibly heavy handed (not surprisingly for anyone with experience of UK or European activism, but i think this may have been an awereness watershed for the UK media) - I among many others got some rather spectacular bruises to show for it - and the complete contrast between the attitudes to life of the state and the people was shown as overwhelmingly obviously as that betweenm life and death.
Indymedia's report on the Climate Camp is here, there are loads of pics including some awesome art drawings, photos of the big day of action including these, these, these, these and these, photos of the camp itself, and some of the other actions (including daft puddings, red herrings and many more)...
(links now unbroken)
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Camp for Climate Action 2007
unordered thoughts, getting them down while i can... probably about 10 "proper" posts to come about it... also, i seem to have somewhat channelled the spirit of Larry Arnold for this post, as i did that of Dave Hingsburger for the last one... i think this may be a form of echolalia, but apologies to both for what might seem like unintentional plagiarism...
The Battle of the Beanfield, mark II. Baton blows like brutal lightning. Bruises like magnificent thunderstorms. NVDA meets BDSM. Oh my God - I am human. So weak and so strong. So broken and so whole. So monstrous and so beautiful. Confrontation, so different from humiliation - the very opposite of trauma. Pain can heal.
We are Hydra, they are Leviathan. If they are a big tree, we are a small axe - or better yet, if they are one big blunt axe, we are a million tiny trees. Nevertheless, the old proverb bears repeating that when the axe came into the forest, some of the trees said "the handle is one of us". Will the social tipping point be reached before the atmospheric tipping point?
A tantalising glimpse, just for a week, of what reality can be - feeling more like a real living being than in normal circumstances i would even think it possible to feel, yet almost instantly vanishing as if it was no more than a dream.
The rollercoaster of at least two completely different kinds of despair, and blazing, angry, defiant, unstoppable hope.
This is how it feels to be alive.
The Battle of the Beanfield, mark II. Baton blows like brutal lightning. Bruises like magnificent thunderstorms. NVDA meets BDSM. Oh my God - I am human. So weak and so strong. So broken and so whole. So monstrous and so beautiful. Confrontation, so different from humiliation - the very opposite of trauma. Pain can heal.
We are Hydra, they are Leviathan. If they are a big tree, we are a small axe - or better yet, if they are one big blunt axe, we are a million tiny trees. Nevertheless, the old proverb bears repeating that when the axe came into the forest, some of the trees said "the handle is one of us". Will the social tipping point be reached before the atmospheric tipping point?
A tantalising glimpse, just for a week, of what reality can be - feeling more like a real living being than in normal circumstances i would even think it possible to feel, yet almost instantly vanishing as if it was no more than a dream.
The rollercoaster of at least two completely different kinds of despair, and blazing, angry, defiant, unstoppable hope.
This is how it feels to be alive.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Biodiversity: an introduction
Right. I've been having trouble writing any actual blog content without feeling like there ought to be something here that's kind of... introductory. (I need to find out how other bloggers started their blogs, i guess.) So i'm now going to attempt to write an introduction to the concept of "biodiversity", and how i see that as relating to disability and the other stuff i'm interested in. Please forgive me for the clunky writing and tendency to waver between the painfully tentative and the pompously would-be-messianic in this post... it's become obvious while writing it that my writing style needs some serious work, which this blog will hopefully provide...
A year or so ago, i was thinking about how strange and disparate my various (online and offline) interests are: disability (including both impairments and social aspects of disability), anarchism, (trans)gender and sexuality issues, ecology, animals/wildlife/zoology, music, literature (each of the latter categories itself subdividing into several different and arguably very disparate subcategories), new social movements, forteana/unexplained phenomena, etc... in an attempt at self-analysis, i pondered how and whether these things were all connected, and whether there was in fact a single, potentially cohesive identity* that i could bring out of all of them.
After pondering this question "What am I?", or perhaps more accurately "What would someone add my various online and offline "identities" up to?", the phrase came to me "I am a lover of biodiversity in all its forms" - that the thread that tied together most, if not quite all, of my interests/obsessions/perseverations was some fundamental love of the diversity of life - both human and nonhuman - a desire for life to be diverse, and to be accepted as such - a love of the unlimited possible forms and processes of life. This concept stayed brewing in the back of my head for quite some time, gradually forming a framework to tentatively hang other thoughts on, until i eventually had it formulated enough to bring up in a conversation with another disability rights activist, not long after i had managed to finally come into contact with other people within that movement.
Until then i had pretty much thought of the "biodiversity as overarching concept" idea as just one of my wild flights of fancy, something on a level with my little personal hybrid theologies/mythologies that in geeky, and often stoned or drunken, conversations with friends more knowledgeable than myself i had made up out of existing belief systems - but his very positive reaction to the concept made me realise that i might actually be on to something here...
The context in which biodiversity is usually understood is a biological and ecological one. Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1985 and defined as "variation of life at all levels of biological organization"; of course, this is generally applied to the non-human world. My use of "biodiversity" as an umbrella concept, which could potentially cover just about all equality and identity issues, is in taking that and applying it to the human world (which parallels my personal desire to apply concepts and methods of activism and social movement organisation learned from the environmentalist movement to the disability movement): bringing together biology and ecology with sociology. Disability, gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, etc can all be seen as elements of the biodiversity of the human species...
One of the key claims of social ecology is that the same systems and ideologies which lead to the domination, exploitation and oppression of humans by other humans also lead to the domination, exploitation and degradation by humans of nature. Ecofeminism, the product of feminists bringing social ecology together with feminism, is based on the idea that the oppression of women is linked to the domination of nature by linguistic and cultural equation of women with non-human nature: this is also true of the historical and current treatment of disabled people, sexually diverse people, people of minority ethnicities and all other groups of people who are seen to differ from a culturally defined "fully human" norm. The same systems of domination - the triple alliance of capitalist monopoly, statist centralisation and patriarchal social segregation - that threaten ecosystems and natural biodiversity through monoculture farming, exploitation of non-renewable resources and unsustainable economic growth also threaten human biodiversity by oppressing, exploiting, discriminating against and attempting, by methods ranging from enforced proletarianisation of peasant cultures to institutionalisation and eugenic abortion or sterilisation of disabled people in developed countries, to eliminate "abnormal" human beings.
The ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear etc movements, the feminist movement, the various anarchist or libertarian socialist movements (including co-operatives, social centres, etc), the postcolonial liberation movements and the rights/freedom movements of disabled people, queer people, trans people, and any other minorities, can thus be seen as (although it has to be said they don't all necessarily see themselves or each other as) part of an overall movement in defence of biodiversity (in all its contextually overlapping definitions) against monoculture (in all its contextually overlapping definitions). In this blog, my aim is to draw together and make connections between all these movements, and in doing so demonstrate, in my own small way (as all the people i link to here do in their own large or small ways) biodiverse resistance...
(*I understand that many people will strongly dispute that one's interests either are the source of, or add up to produce, one's identity. The concept of "identity" for me is a complex one, and there are ways in which i believe that, for me (and possibly other autistic people) it actually is significantly different than for most people - that it's possible i/we actually lack some kind of "core" identity that many/most other people have, and thus need to piece together a (no less "real", just differently constructed) "identity" from other things. I'm probably going to blog about this at some point in more detail...)
A year or so ago, i was thinking about how strange and disparate my various (online and offline) interests are: disability (including both impairments and social aspects of disability), anarchism, (trans)gender and sexuality issues, ecology, animals/wildlife/zoology, music, literature (each of the latter categories itself subdividing into several different and arguably very disparate subcategories), new social movements, forteana/unexplained phenomena, etc... in an attempt at self-analysis, i pondered how and whether these things were all connected, and whether there was in fact a single, potentially cohesive identity* that i could bring out of all of them.
After pondering this question "What am I?", or perhaps more accurately "What would someone add my various online and offline "identities" up to?", the phrase came to me "I am a lover of biodiversity in all its forms" - that the thread that tied together most, if not quite all, of my interests/obsessions/perseverations was some fundamental love of the diversity of life - both human and nonhuman - a desire for life to be diverse, and to be accepted as such - a love of the unlimited possible forms and processes of life. This concept stayed brewing in the back of my head for quite some time, gradually forming a framework to tentatively hang other thoughts on, until i eventually had it formulated enough to bring up in a conversation with another disability rights activist, not long after i had managed to finally come into contact with other people within that movement.
Until then i had pretty much thought of the "biodiversity as overarching concept" idea as just one of my wild flights of fancy, something on a level with my little personal hybrid theologies/mythologies that in geeky, and often stoned or drunken, conversations with friends more knowledgeable than myself i had made up out of existing belief systems - but his very positive reaction to the concept made me realise that i might actually be on to something here...
The context in which biodiversity is usually understood is a biological and ecological one. Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1985 and defined as "variation of life at all levels of biological organization"; of course, this is generally applied to the non-human world. My use of "biodiversity" as an umbrella concept, which could potentially cover just about all equality and identity issues, is in taking that and applying it to the human world (which parallels my personal desire to apply concepts and methods of activism and social movement organisation learned from the environmentalist movement to the disability movement): bringing together biology and ecology with sociology. Disability, gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, etc can all be seen as elements of the biodiversity of the human species...
One of the key claims of social ecology is that the same systems and ideologies which lead to the domination, exploitation and oppression of humans by other humans also lead to the domination, exploitation and degradation by humans of nature. Ecofeminism, the product of feminists bringing social ecology together with feminism, is based on the idea that the oppression of women is linked to the domination of nature by linguistic and cultural equation of women with non-human nature: this is also true of the historical and current treatment of disabled people, sexually diverse people, people of minority ethnicities and all other groups of people who are seen to differ from a culturally defined "fully human" norm. The same systems of domination - the triple alliance of capitalist monopoly, statist centralisation and patriarchal social segregation - that threaten ecosystems and natural biodiversity through monoculture farming, exploitation of non-renewable resources and unsustainable economic growth also threaten human biodiversity by oppressing, exploiting, discriminating against and attempting, by methods ranging from enforced proletarianisation of peasant cultures to institutionalisation and eugenic abortion or sterilisation of disabled people in developed countries, to eliminate "abnormal" human beings.
The ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear etc movements, the feminist movement, the various anarchist or libertarian socialist movements (including co-operatives, social centres, etc), the postcolonial liberation movements and the rights/freedom movements of disabled people, queer people, trans people, and any other minorities, can thus be seen as (although it has to be said they don't all necessarily see themselves or each other as) part of an overall movement in defence of biodiversity (in all its contextually overlapping definitions) against monoculture (in all its contextually overlapping definitions). In this blog, my aim is to draw together and make connections between all these movements, and in doing so demonstrate, in my own small way (as all the people i link to here do in their own large or small ways) biodiverse resistance...
(*I understand that many people will strongly dispute that one's interests either are the source of, or add up to produce, one's identity. The concept of "identity" for me is a complex one, and there are ways in which i believe that, for me (and possibly other autistic people) it actually is significantly different than for most people - that it's possible i/we actually lack some kind of "core" identity that many/most other people have, and thus need to piece together a (no less "real", just differently constructed) "identity" from other things. I'm probably going to blog about this at some point in more detail...)
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