Homecoming

@hai-gui

"You're studying philosophy? You must still be searching for the meaning of life."

94 posts

Why call in?

tw: oblique references to eating disorders

Calling out and calling in are quite literally orientations. So why call in? The very point of the “outwards” orientation is to dispel that which is disgusting. When we’ve eaten something bad, something disgusting, our bodies expel it through vomiting (though does this work when we find necessary food disgusting and force ourselves to dispel it?). Taking in is a sign of necessity and eventual integration.

So when it comes to our community members, is it possible to call in and bring them in tighter while selectively expeling parts of them and behaviors of theirs that we find unsavory? The fear of the inclusion of those unsavory bits into the community is what drives calling out; when we call people in, is it that either we accept how the feel of the community may change through the acceptance of that which we find disgusting, or we enforce assimilation to the feel of the community as a condition of calling in?

The orientation of calling out/in

To call-out is quite literally to orient outwards, whether to defend a boundary or to expel something outwards. To call-in is to orient inwards, to bring inwards and perhaps to reflect inwards. This is why critiquing for the sake of critiquing--think Suey Park--is one of the surest ways of imploding a community: a performance of critiquing without real work changes the orientation with nothing to sustain a new affective flow.

Kanye West & the emotional labor drain in community organizing.

I was reading an interview Ayesha Siddiqi gave to The Guardian (I’ll admit, I’ve got some career and brains envy going on), and in it mentioned her love for and defense of Kanye West. It got me thinking about my experiences with Kanye-like personalities, none of which ended well. Yes, it is important to demand “what you’re owed,” especially as a person coming from a marginalized identity. But when you demand that not from the institutions and structures of power that have contributed to your marginalization, but from the people who stand with you or whose backs on which you stand?

The central question I am asking here is why does so much of our community organizing and community identity revolve around megalomaniacs who insist on dynamics of domination? Kanye West is an example of this. He is a megalomaniac--yes, if he were white his body would be shielded from this term as his ambitions would be portrayed favorably, and that does not change the fact that he is a megalomaniac--and one of the leading women of color writers and thinkers of my generation went to great lengths to defend him. Siddiqi has great influence in pushing conversations in marginalized communities, and a defence of Kanye West has been a dominant conversation in People of Color communities. From my experience as a community organizer, one of the major walls we hit is the need to cater to egos. What I mean by ego is not the mutual buoying of self-esteems by connection with heritage and with others; what I mean by ego is the need to assert dominance over others within the community. Dominance and catering to someone else’s need to be dominant are immediate drains on emotional labor. As I’ve written before, power is a measure of how quickly privileged people can transfer their workload, and emotional labor is work. Thus engaging in these public figures as a way to define and patrol our community identity may not be productive work, but perhaps counterproductive.

Case in point: part of Kanye’s ego lies in the fact that his current partner is Kim Kardashian, a fact which he used to dismiss and shame Amber Rose, his ex-girlfriend who is a Black woman.

References

Ayesha Siddiqi’s interview with The Guardian: (x)

my previous post: (x)

Emotional labor.

In the last year, discussions of emotional labor have taken off in feminist circles online. In July, there were extended discussions on MetaFilter about emotional labor, and for a piece on the history of the concept of “emotional labor,” I recommend reading this.

I am interested in meshing emotional labor with Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed draws upon Marxist theory to describe the work emotions do in society. Ahmed explicitly draws parallels between money and emotions: when emotions circulate amoung bodies, then there is an economy; where there is economy, that which is being circulated has currency and therefore value. With any economy, there are established sets of flows for the currency, and breaking out of established flows or establishing new flows is a challenge. It is no different in an affective economy.

Labor comes into the picture in that waged labor is traded for money in a monetary economy. Unwaged labor, such as emotional labor, is traded in a different economy for a different currency. In the case of emotional labor, it is traded in an affective economy. The affective economies that Ahmed describes in order to explain the work emotions do in society contain emotional labor, for emotional labor is the work each body does to maintain the established affective flow. Work is a form of energy, and each body has a finite amount of energy. Maintaining an established affective flow requires less energy and work than breaking out of an established affective flow--which is why assimilation is far easier to solidarity, and why so often in hetero relationships women find themselves burdened with the emtional labor even though they may have talked with their partners about parity of power in the relationship. Socialized cultural practices are not changed overnight.

With all of this said, there are limits to the framework of an affective economy. In a monetary economy, money is the equilizer that erases difference. A muffin, a pen, and a pair of socks can all cost $1; they all have equal value despite being very different objects. In an affective economy, different emotions work in different ways in different contexts and cannot be equalized in such a manner. As such, we can conclude that the value of emotional labor, depending on its context and the exact emotions being circulated, also varies.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Hackman, Rose. "'Women Are Just Better at This Stuff': Is Emotional Labor Feminism's next Frontier?" The Guardian, 8 Nov. 2015. Web. 24 Dec. 2015.

MetaFilter threads on emotional labor, original: (x) (x)

MetaFilter threads on emotional labor, condensed: (x)

my previous post: (x)

An exercise.

Try the following exercise, something medical health professionals call Progressive Muscle Relaxiation (which is great for those of us with lots of anxiety): close your eyes. Ground your feet into the ground, nice and firm but without tensing up your calves. Do you feel how the ground or the soles of your shoes feel? Good. Now in your mind’s eye, picture your feet. Your toes. Start drawing your toes from the left pinky toe, moving inwards. What do you see?

It’s a lot harder to imagine your toes than you thought, right? On a daily basis, you can easily tell if there’s an odd blister or cut on one of them--basically you can tell when they deviate from the norm--but to picture them as they are is a very different exercise.

You move up your body, noticing sensations and temperatures and pressure points. (I’m fast-forwarding here.) Now we get to your hands, nice and loose and relaxed. Picture your left hand in your mind’s eye as it is. Try drawing it in your mind. How is your hand curled up? Which finger is more curled up than the rest? Is your middle more curled than your pointer? Is your curled up ring finger tilting slightly in?

You...can’t really tell, can you, without opening your eyes?

Throughout The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed draws from phenomenologists before her in establishing that how we move through the physical world, in our physical bodies, shapes our understanding of the social world. The example she uses is how when our bodies are at their normal state, we do not notice them. It is only when there is something that disorients--a pain or a pleasure--that parts of our physical bodies come into view. That is the same, socially: bodies that are socially deemed the norm (i.e. white, cishet, male, middle class and above, able) fade into the background. Other bodies are encouraged to fade into the background by replicating the affective economy of normal bodies; that is, they pass on the same emotions and “feels” as normal bodies.

I bring up the example of Progressive Muscle Relaxation to demonstrate how institutions may work, with thousands or millions of bodies at work in this one larger, cohesive body that is a separate entity from the parts that comprise it. This is an example that Sara Ahmed uses as well: certain oppressed classes are the hands, or the feet, or the back. Those of the “ruling class” are the head. The institutions that dominate our society are the body as a whole. The head is in control and keeps tabs on the other parts. All the parts work in tandem. When something goes wrong with the other parts, the head is aware of the situation, but the head is not truly aware of every curve, crevice, and line of the parts.The body as a whole is not completely aware of the space it occupies and the space its parts occupy in relation to each other. But this only leads to questions: social bodies have wills and desires, but do physical bodies? When we use these metaphors--feet and hands, or infections on the feet and hands, don’t exactly have wills and desires--there is an inherent disconnect. And what is the connection between the part and the whole? Can we articulate a line of thought that clearly begins from the part and ends at the whole, or starts at the larger body and narrows down to the part?

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Space & force.

Space, in physics, is the relative positioning and direction of objects and events in a boundless three-dimensional way. From Newton’s three laws: an object in motion stays in motion and an object at rest stays at rest until there is an external force changing this inertia. Force is an interaction that will change the motion of an object. Work, a form of energy, is force multipled by distance.

This post has its roots in my personal life. Whenever I find myself with a new white, middle class, cishet boyfriend, inevitably things get difficult two months in when the honeymoon wears off. The relationship starts hurting and being hurtful. So often it comes down to an issue of space: they don’t realize how much space they occupy in the relationship and how because their privileges, which allow them to disproportionately occupy space, are energy-saving devices, I am expected to do most of the emotional labor. When they expand and demand that my boundaries be changed to accomodate them, it quite often feels like I’m being pushed into a brick wall. The contact hurts. The change to my boundaries from the interaction is bruising. The force they use is unexpected (well, not really), and the change in the affective flow of the relationship is unexpected (also, not really). I always push back; given that inertia always wins out, I cannot afford to let a precedence of their space-hogging take root. I will not let my work be taken for granted, I will not shrink my body so I take up less space, and I will use force through the force of my will. Then they feel hurt, as the motion of their body is changed in what is truly unexpected ways for them–for the men I’ve dated, this is the first time in their lives that in a relationship that their partner has articulated a demand for equity in emotional labor, space, and power. They then try to stick it on me: I am the willful subject who is the source of unhappiness. Using ideas outlined by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Willful Subjects, that stems from the fact that the body which disorients from the background–inherently mine, as the white middle class cishet male body is the cultural norm–is viewed as the source of the emotions that stick to it. These disorienting bodies are framed as willful.

The same could be said for when we fight with our own, why assimilation takes precedence within marginalized communities, and why solidarity is such hard work. When individual bodies try to expand, inevitably they will bump up against the bodies of others. There will be pain, there will be hurt: the affective flow of the community will be disoriented. However, because no body type is truly viewed as the cultural norm, the disorientations threaten our current notions of solidarity that are based on assimilation within a community. Assimilation is the process by which some bodies fade into the background and become the norm; each community has its norms, so to speak. So the line, get in line or get the fuck out, is repeated. The bodies that do not are disorienting, willful subjects that are deemed a threat to the community’s health, and are pushed out, much like how our physical bodies–a microcosm of bodies living in tandem–reject and expel things that are deemed not a part of it.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. New York: Duke University Press, 2014. Print.

Accessing pain.

In previous posts I’ve written about pain, how pain is binding, and the role of pain in solidarity. Pain is binding and necessary for solidarity, but there is also a question of who can access pain. Are white-passing people of color who are a legacy of colonialism and imperialism, and very often the sexual violence that accompanies the two, allowed to access that pain? Or does the whiteness of their physical bodies--which often translates into experiencing aspects of white privilege--override that right and the right to connect with their heritage?

References

my previous posts: (x) (x)

(In)visibility.

So often, the invisibility of Asian Americans is held as being “better” than the hypervisibility of Black people and Black bodies. We are “conditionally privileged.” This means that in situations where solidarity is called upon, we are expected to center on anti-blackness, to subsume our experiences, to “get in line or get the fuck out.”

In an earlier post, I wrote about how assimilation and solidarity are flip sides to the same coin. “Get in line or get the fuck out” is assimilation politics, and that is why efforts at solidarity that require this mentality inevitably fall apart: in the words of Audre Lorde, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Solidarity means that we live on common ground while our bodies are still visible instead of fading into the background. Solidarity means that there will be a lot of uncomfortable feelings as we maintain visibility.

So why do we fall back onto assimilation politics? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire outlines the trajectories of liberation movements. The second stage of liberation is when some of the oppressed become “sub-oppressors” in a misguided attempt to reclaim their humanity. The assumption is that oppressors have their humanity, which they have obtained by oppressing others. So to emulate that, members of the oppressed begin sub-oppression in trying to obtain the humanity that oppressors have, as though humanity is an object.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print.

Lorde, Audre. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 110-114. Print.

Nakagawa, Scott. "More on Asian Privilege." Race Files. 15 Mar. 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.

my previous post: (x)

When you are confronted with racism in public:

1. Your body knows what’s coming. Adrenaline pumps through your system. Your heart begins to pound.

2. You doubt yourself. Did I really hear that right?

3. Your heart pounds harder, louder. You get cottonmouth.

4. No, they didn’t really say that. Oh no they did and you know they did that voice says inside of you.

5. Your heart pounds even harder and louder. How is that possible when it already felt like it was jumping out of your chest and the sound of blood rushing in your ears makes everything else a bit mute like in the movies?

6. Do you say something? Half of you screams YES CONFRONT THOSE WHITE RACIST BITCHES and the other half of you is like nonononononononononono just leave and it’ll all be forgotten! Do you dare something when your very bodily safety could be compromised?

7. Your heart is beating so loud and so hard that you’re sure you are shaking. But you must remain calm, composed, cool, very cool, no one can tell what you are thinking and of the inner conflict going on.

8. YES SAY SOMETHING EMBARRASS THEM nononononononononoonononononoooooo just leave they’re about to get off SAY SOMETHING STAND UP FOR YOURSELF FOR ONCE IN THESE SITUATIONS nononononononononononononononononoooooooooooo you’re about to get off even though they didn’t get off on this stop JUST SAY SOMETHING AND STAND UP FOR YOURSELF YOU KNOW THESE ASSHOLES SAID SOMETHING REALLY RACIST DIRECTED AT YOU YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO DEFEND YOURSELF

9. Compromise: as you get off at your stop, you stand up and look them in the eye and say, “The next time you two want to say something racist in public, you probably want to make sure no one around you can understand you.” Then you get off as quickly as possible and assure yourself that you are calm.

10. As you walk, your heart steadily pounds less and you can hear just fine again without that muted haze and the adrenaline dissipates.

(11. All of this as Donald Trump condones racial hate attacks in America.)

Assimilation/solidarity.

Using Ahmed’s affect theory, we can articulate how assimilation and solidarity are flip sides to the same coin.

For a recap of Ahmed’s affect theory: feelings are not something within us or something external that we then internalize. Think of a vector field or pebbles in a stream of water; we are bodies that pass along the flow of emotions as well as change and disorient the flow of emotions. Our boundaries of identity only surface upon contact with objects, such as other bodies, experiences, and emotions that leave impressions on our surfaces. (Think of how we say oh that event or person left quite an impression on me. Quite literally, an impression on your memory and the surfaces that inform your sense of self.) When bodies come together, it is the pattern of affect flow that can determine the boundaries of a community. Lines of movement form in a field to establish boundaries, and communities maintain certain flows of feelings that establish and reinforce boundaries.

One of the corallaries of Ahmed’s affect theory is that bodies that go with the flow, bodies that do not disorient from the affective flow, fade into the background. For example, the default identity in society is the cis, straight, upper middle class, white male body. All other bodies are described in relation to this default identity: everyone is assumed to be cis and straight unless you declare otherwise, articles are written about how the poor are a social burden, symptoms of diseases are all described as how they manifest in men, and immigrants to the West are always described as threatening life as we know it until they assimilate. Assimilation is the process by which bodies that once disoriented fade into the background. Those bodies circulate emotions and feelings of the community as how emotions were circulated. When a given circulation pattern is restored, life as we know it is restored.

Solidarity, on the other hand, requires bodies to be visible and to not fade into the background. Groups and individuals come together to work together but without sublimating their identities. This is why solidarity is so tricky, even when we acknowledge we live on common ground and in common space. Solidarity requires disorientation and it requires us to be okay with that emotional turmoil. There is no smooth affective flow with solidarity, or rather, bodies must consistently negotiate and re-negotiate the flow of feelings for bodies to not fade. However, because we are socialized to assimilate and to reach a point where the flow of feelings is smooth and known, we struggle with the idea of disorientation and constantly having to re-negotiate the work feelings do in spaces. And that is why so often within marginalized communities, it is get in line or get the fuck out.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

The “who” of suicide.

My research centers on why and how marginalized communities form and fall apart, or “assimilate.” Much of my research is inspired by the last four years of my life. I’ve been a politician, activist, community organizer, teacher, and feminist killjoy. It is during these four years that I’ve noticed a trend: the other leading activists and community organizers are almost always, like me, queer women of color who have tense relationships with their communities and who have attempted suicide.

I am writing this post because in the last month, three of those friends have attempted suicide. Not the first time for any of them. It never is for any of us. It’s as if who we are and our histories draw us to the work of advocacy and community organizing, and the work of advocacy and community organizing requires people like us with histories like ours. Advocacy and community organizing fulfills something in us, allowing us to thrive, but it also exacerbates the very things that threaten our survival. Our tense relationships with our communities hinges on what we are too much of and what we are not: we are too activist, we are not straight or male or white—we are not respectable. (Our communities like to tack on “enough” to that, but we know inside that there is never anything that can make us respectable “enough.”)

It is a paradox when you sit down to think about it: the very people who are driving the protection of marginalized communities so that marginalized peoples can live are the same ones likely to be shunned by those communities and the ones to end their own lives. There is a lot to be said here about the connections between the individual and the community (which I’m working on). Ahmed’s works point to the issue of orientation: not only do we disorient in larger society, but our work causes our bodies to be disorienting bodies within our own communities. Our communities that feel the pinch of marginalization and would rather assimilate perhaps do not see the need for our insistence on being willful and willfully disorienting. And if privilege is an energy-saving device, we have no or very little privileges to act as energy-saving devices as we pour our energy into others and into our communities. At the end of the day, we have none left to protect ourselves, to arm ourselves, to fortify ourselves against what we are implicitly told by larger society and our communities: that we should be quieter, that we should censor our words and identities, that we should disappear.

References

Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. New York: Duke University Press, 2014. Print.

Learning solidarity.

Sara Ahmed writes about how norms come into being and why history is so important in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Through the repetition of actions, norms come into shape. A history of experiences becomes the body of knowledge to which we compare future experiences, to know how we should judge and act.

Solidarity (not so) simply asks us to recognize, in the words of Ahmed, that though we may have different stories and histories of pain, we share common ground. The space we live in is the same, even if we occupy that space in different ways. Which is why it is so important that past examples of solidarity have happened and are erased. Without a history to compare our experiences to, repetitions and patterns cannot arise. Solidarity as a norm does not exist, and we are forced to relearn each time.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

on the role of Jewish leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: (x)(x)

War on Terror.

I was at a public forum organized by #NoRoomForRacism, titled UNITING AGAINST ISLAMOPHOBIA, about how to counter right-wing groups such as Reclaim Australia. Some of the things the panelists said jumped out at me because earlier in the day, I had just been reviewing my notes on The Cultural Politics of Emotion. “Fear is contagious,” both in terms of the growing fear in the Muslim community with regards to living in Australia and their personal safety being compromised by larger cultural notions, and in terms of the fear that drives mainstream narratives about certain kinds of people coming to invade borders by boat and refugee status or through attacks. “Singling out easy targets,” whether it is public policy targeting Muslim communities or national rhetoric about how our country is constantly under attack, from physical assaults to cyber ones. “We are no safer, just more polarized.”

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion Ahmed writes about how emotions work to shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies. Emotions shape bodies as forms of actions. Bodies take the shape of the contact that they have with objects and others. Public discourse works by aligning the subject with the collective by attributing “others” as the “source” of emotions. Ahmed uses examples from Great Britain, such as the “soft touch” metaphor used by British politicians that imagines the nation as a soft body that can be bruised upon contact with others. The examples from today work too; fear is imagined as a disease that spreads from other bodies to yours and as an emotion that shapes you and takes over you from others. In our society, weakness is defined as a tendency to be shaped by others and feeling fear is a sign of a body’s weakness. A body that has been touched and shaped by fear is a weak body, an easy target. An easy target is fearful and is attributed with being the source of fear. A nation’s response to fear, to weakening, to being an easy target is nationalism–in Australia’s case, paranoid nationalism. A preoccupation and an occupation of borders. If we strengthen those borders, often times with the politics of authenticity about “real Australians,” our body will not be an easy target. If we fight against that fear and the perceived sources of fear, we will be safer and whole and uninvaded.

So the question here is: what will marginalized communities do in response to fear of the society that has excluded their bodies? Ahmed writes further that when “shared feelings” are at stake, feelings not only heighten the tension but are in tension: even if we may be feeling the same feeling, our relationship to that feeling differs. Emotion is not a property that passes from one body to the next; emotions arise through circulation and through contact with objects. If our bodies have been pinned as the source of fear, if fear sticks to us (we are both feared and fearful), then what do we do?

References

an article in the Guardian about the panel: (x)

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003.

Fascism & capitalism.

Fascism and fascists have been on the news quite a bit in Australia in the last few months. Which got me thinking:

1. Noam Chomsky, in an interview in the 1970s, said

[U]nder capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.

Chomsky here draws a link between the political ideology of fascism and the economic ideology of capitalism; as in, the two are not that far from each other. They serve as complementary systems of control in two different but intertwined domains.

2. Which leads me to D&G and their work on microfascism, fascism, and capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. For D&G, desire is the driving impetus in humans and therefore the primary economic concept. Capitalism is but one manifestation of that human desire, one that is both political and psychological. Desire produces rules; it structures how we go about our daily lives. When you get that Xbox you’ve wanted forever, you start playing games on it in your downtime. Your roommate gets earplugs if she or he wants to sleep at night as you’re playing on your Xbox. You start picking up new ways of saying things (e.g. teabagging) and even a few new friends you otherwise wouldn’t have met. The object of your desire leads to new habits and social etiquettes.

Another driving human impetus, according to D&G, is the creation of these rules, or microstructures, in our lives. When I put on makeup, I first put on concealer, then eyeliner, then mascara, then blush, then lipstick. When these microstructures bump into the microstructures of other people, microfascism becomes a thing. Say you’re used to walking on the left side of the road, and some American (me) is walking on the right side. Why can’t that American just get with the program and walk on the side of the road I’m on so that everything’s just simpler and more efficient and if I want to pass her and the person in front of her, it’s a simple jump and not a complicated zig zag? When you multiply this thought process of the necessity of homogeneity in habits and beliefs across larger populations, you get fascism.

D&G argue that previous social structures kept human desire in check. Think, for example, marriage: love is tucked away into a union that focuses on procreation. Love, as a desire, is messy; marriage discourages such messiness and love outside of marriage is discouraged. Capitalism, on the other hand, unleashes the full potential of desire by deterritorializing it and then reterritorializing it. (This ties into D&G’s arguments about identity.) Fascism, as a political movement, with its emphasis on control and homogeneity rose in response to capitalism’s unleashing of desire.

3. However, that is not to say the two cannot be extremely similar. Capitalism can be fascist, as Chomsky notes, and fascism can be capitalistic. Fascism arose as a response to capitalism, which means it arose in the context of capitalism. To oppose capitalism is not the same as to subvert it. Fascism took on many of the base ideologies of capitalism, such as a hierarchical scheme of control (think to Marx’s analysis of the means of production). What Chomsky’s quote loses is historical precedence: capitalism precedes fascism, not the other way around.

References

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1983. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1987. Print.

interview with Noam Chomsky: (x)

news article about recent rallies in Australia: (x)

Migrating Minds.

Tonight I went to Migrating Minds: a forum on mental health within CALD migrant communities, which showcased seven short films about the issues of mental health in immigrant communities. One of the things that struck me about this was the overlap with another forum I went to that discussed being queer in immigrant communities. The tension between the individual and the family or community was still that of as marginalized peoples, family and community are all we have. But sometimes family and community are the source of our stress, specifically that which is “all we have” is turning on us. Larger society blames our families and communities and not the fact that we are marginalized.

This brings me to one of my adviser’s work (and a panelist at tonight’s event). Cultural safety in healthcare, especially mental health, is so important. Flipping the gaze is essential; how are medical practitioners disempowering their patients by the assumed attitudes they bring to the table? In terms of mental health support, how are medical practitioners reducing people to certain aspects of their identity for a learning experience as opposed to addressing the issues they are bringing?

References

Migrating Minds event description: (x)

Ruth DeSouza’s post on her Nurse Academic in Australia blog: (x)

Police & the settler-colonialist state.

Angela Davis (via ninjaruski) has written and lectured a great deal about the American prison-industrial system, from its origins to its effects elsewhere in the world. Tonight, I went to a forum hosted by the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre about racialized policing in Australia. While Davis’s analysis of the American system is specific to its context, the larger lessons are not. Police brutality and the existence of prison-industrial complexes are consistent across Western countries. If policing and the penal systems attached to it are about maintaining the status quo, then racialized policing is about reinforcing the settler-colonial state. As such, policing and the penal system are inherently tied to colonialism.

The police and penal systems of Western countries are tied to colonialism because of the issue of who uses space. Space is policed; the police are a mechanism of transforming space. Australia is a perfect example of this. To paraphrase Charandev Singh, a panelist at the forum, the weapons colonization of Australia had three prongs: the terra nullius law that gave moral and ethical reasoning to colonialism; an social system centered on imprisonment and the penal system that began with the landing of the First Fleet, a fleet of English convicts; a paramilitary police forcibly removed Aboriginal peoples from their land by any means necessary. The paramilitary police first changed spaces so that a settler-colonial society of convicts could take hold, then changed spaces so that Aborignal peoples were funneled into the penal system of said settler-colonial society of convicts. In the last five years, the number of Aboriginal women in Australian prisons has skyrocketed to the point where they are now a third of the female prison population, the proximate cause being incarcerated for unpaid fines. The police are also involved in removing Aboriginal children from their homes and evicting Aboriginal peoples from rural settlements that the government has deemed unsustainable. With the first example, the police are an active part of transforming social space. When these children cannot connect to their heritage, they cannot resist assimilation; when they cannot resist assimilation, the policies of settler-colonial state can take hold without dissent. In the latter example, the police are an active part of transforming physical space. Without the rural communities there, a settler-colonialist state can move in and reap the profits from mining in those areas where people once lived.

Racial profiling, racialized policing, and their accompanying penal system are not acknowledged as community development issues. The forum ended on Singh noting that the narratives of assimilation must be questioned and assimilation must be resisted. To challenge the practices of the police and the penal system of a settler-colonialist state means we cannot adopt assimilationist views.

References

Angela Davis’s lecture, via ninjaruski: (x)

Public Forum: Racialized Policing: from Ferguson to Flemington (x)

Power & energy.

In physics, power is the rate at which work is done, and energy is the capacity at which work is done. Therefore, power is a measure of how quickly energy is transferred.

Sara Ahmed recently gave a talk where she noted that “privilege as energy-saving device.” This is one of those common sense things—think of all the jokes we have about the sexual fetishes white people have and all the activities white people do because they have too much time and energy on their hands—but seeing her state it like that got me thinking.

We most frequently associate privilege with power. So what is the relationship between power and energy? What is energy? Ahmed continued on to talk about how diversity work requires effort and how “insistence is a form of political labor.” A political will to freedom takes labor and work and time and energy, usually in amounts that outstrips most people until they find reserves of anger, discontent, and unhappiness to fuel them. And my favorite professor’s tagline: social movement will always die out simply because the energy needed to change the system is too great. The inertia of the system will always win out.

So what is the energy of power, and the power of energy? If power is the rate at which work done, then those with power and in power have the ability to get more work done; that is, more of society’s work is attributed to them. The work of the oppressed classes is overlooked. Think of the discourse surrounding the labor of women and motherhood. Energy can then be thought of as the ability of those with power and in power to foist their workload onto others. If I hand you my work, then that frees me up to do other things. Oh, by the way, at the end of the day, I’m still taking credit or overlooking the fact that you did it. Power is then a measure of how quickly privileged people can transfer their workload. Under today’s capitalistic social rules where our sense is defined by “self worth” and our productivity, this translates into how quickly the privileged can dispossess the oppressed based on ideas of production and usefulness.

References

basic explanations of work, energy, and power in physics: (x)(x)

tweets of Sara Ahmed’s talk: (x)(x)

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