Musings of a Young Asian Feminist

Welcome to Liz's blog for GWS 104

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

On Blogging

I thought the blogging experience would be easy, but I was surprised by how simultaneously right and wrong I was. I'm an avid Tumblr user outside of this class, so I thought using the Tumblr platform would make this assignment easier. While it definitely made formatting more comfortable, the writing itself was just as elusive as it would've been on any other blogging site. Writing for friends and for casual acquaintances is one thing. Writing for peers about academic theory is a beast all its own. Though the focus was to engage with class ideas, I definitely faced what I’ve heard my peers say in their reflections, which is this feeling that my ideas were not smart enough and not valid enough. The posts which felt the most intelligent and the most worthy were those which encompassed stiff, impersonal academic language, but they didn’t feel like they reflected me. Those posts which reflected me most closely moved away from that aforementioned formulaic way of writing. While I’d like to think I began to find a balance, I know even as blogging came to an end and even now, that balance is precarious at best and more than likely broken. Still, I appreciate the blog space, which to me is significantly more comfortable a platform than speaking in class. A writer at heart, it always feels that my written word is more thoughtful and more composed than anything I might try and say in class. Overall, the academic blog experience has been interesting and thought provoking. I have enjoyed having the opportunity to see and read many of my classmates’ thoughts- especially those whose voices are quieter in our classroom space.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

The Rhizome

The first thing I think of when I hear the word "rhizome" is not histories, but a specific moment of my history sitting in Bio 1B learning about plants. As one of my classmates pointed out during our discussing, in science, the rhizome is somewhat of an evolutionary leftover. It's not a real root and it doesn't quite make sense. Rhizomes, possibly somewhat ironically, are put into its place along the evolutionary timeline and then forgotten about so that we can discuss taproots and monocots instead. But in thinking about the rhizome as a way of imagining histories as interconnected and without beginning or end, the rhizome becomes so impossibly important. Its confusing quality which was overlooked in biology is its key quality in this view. The rhizome is so brilliant because it has no beginning or end. It shows the way our pasts are influenced by our futures and vice versa. Rhizomes grow so that new shoots can grow upward like in bamboo, and in the context of our stories and our histories, I think that’s a pretty wonderful way to think of it. It’s as though the complicated and intricate histories before me gave rise to my shoot, my life, and mine will give room to another, and so on and so forth. Though it still feels kind of difficult, I want to continue thinking about history, especially our personal histories and stories, as this complicated, sometimes forgotten, rhizome which keeps me connected to all those before me and keeps them connected to me in a way that is so much deeper than just cause and effect.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

Gay Assimilation

In talking about homonationalism during today's presentation and the implications of DADT's repeal and the current case on same-sex marriage, I am thinking about this blog post I recently read titled "Why I Almost Defriended Everyone Who Had an HRC Logo" in response to the wildfire "activism" on Facebook right before the Supreme Court began its case on same-sex marriage which consisted of people changing their profile pictures to the red HRC logo of an equal sign. (As if the HRC cares about real equality...) I remember watching in horror as one by one my Facebook became flooded with the HRC logo and messages about "gay marriage". My sister asked me a few days after the initial wave of picture changes and how I felt about it all, and I replied I didn't care. My sister pushed, asking didn't I feel so supported because of everyone changing their profile picture? No, I didn't and I don't. As is noted in the post I linked above, the Human Rights Campaign is notoriously racist and transphobic. As someone once said, "The revolution will be intersectional, or it won't be my revolution." In the words of Audre Lorde, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." So when faced with the question of if I feel supported by seeing the HRC everywhere, my answer continues to be a resounding no. More troubling than the ignorant feel-good "allyship" shown by the changing of profile pictures in support of "gay marriage" are the folks who read an article like the one linked and somehow still reply that "I did it because it is the best visibility for gay rights" and "no movement is ever perfect, and even though I see the HRC has not been accountable to PoC and trans* folks, I still want to support them because they're doing the most". Homonationalism has erased radical movements from the mind's eye, and I think that is its scariest aspect. Its assimilationist motives aim to, as my classmate worded perfectly during the presentation, "create an nonthreatening queer". Homonationalism seeks to erase from the public, whose lack of critical viewing makes the washing all the easier, the struggles of folks who do not identify with the "Gay and Lesbian" experience, whose ideal relationship does not end in marriage, whose ideals move past the capitalist wet dream of all out materialism. It seeks to erase intersectionality in place of "colorblindness" and assimilation into the American ideal of patriotic, white, cis, homonormative nuclear families. Homonationalism is not only harmful; it is terrifying. Homonationalism has no problem leaving people like me behind, and that is scary. The HRC logo is not a symbol of progress or equity. It is a symbol of silence and assimilation. So if you ask me how I feel about my friends, my loved ones, changing their profile pictures to the HRC logo, my answer is not that I feel supported. I am terrified.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

Sex Selection

As a Chinese-American growing up amidst the implementation of China's One Child law and the brewing advances in implantation and reproduction, even before the idea of feminism was a blip on my radar, sex selection and son preference were on my mind. When I was in the fourth grade, it became a fad to adopt Chinese girls to save them from abandonment from parents who wanted their one child to be a son. It became one so much so that one of classmates became the older sibling to one of these said Chinese girls and all the while I was expected to be the voice for China and all Chinese girls and explain why a thing like this was even necessary.

  As is noted in the article, “Obviously, sex selection is a problem. It requires adherence to the fallacy that sons and daughters are biologically limited in what they can do and who they can be… Moreover, desperately wanting a specific sex requires us to believe in and thus perpetuate the notion of two genders.” (Jesudason and  Shenker-Osorio, 2) . This was apparent to me even before I understood the language to describe it. I remember reflecting on my own life and the way I might never have been conceived if my mother had not miscarried the son who had almost been born before me. I thought about my cousins and the way my grandfather spoiled my older cousin because he was the only grandson on that side of the family and therefore the only way to pass on the family name and therefore the most important grandchild. For as long as I can remember, I knew I would never be able to that important in my grandparents’ eyes because I was not a boy.

  Sexism and the resulting sex selection happened before IVF and will certainly happen after, regardless of whether or not laws restrict it. As the article noted, the only real way to combat this is to combat old assumptions and break down son preference and empower women.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

One of my classmates wrote a post this week about creating new structures within our class in order to better accommodate differing student needs, and it got me thinking about Mel Chen's book and her lecture, especially when she pointed out the diagram in the book. I appreciated that Chen kept the diagram despite its rather confusing structure which she noted even her partner, whose interests lie in visual representation, could not stand in order to make the ideas more accessible for more visual learners. In thinking about that, I've been thinking about the very different ways in which my reading for my biology classes differ from that of my gender and women's studies classes. While it might be expected that these two do have very different readings due to very different topics, it still feels like maybe there shouldn't be. Are the people who study biology more likely to be visual than those in gender and women's studies? If I am a visual learner in biology, why wouldn’t I be a visual learner in my other courses as well? Interestingly, I find that my science classes are much better at appealing to all types of learners. Textbooks almost always include an assortment of pictures and diagrams alongside long blocks of text. Lectures appeal to aural learners and labs appeal to kinetic learners. Though  not every class is going  to be compatible with every learner, there is definitely a wide variety of modes of learning. In my gender and women’s studies classes, however, there has always only been one structure which involves reading long, often incredibly difficult to understand and piece together articles, essays, and books which we read so that we can have volunteer-based discussions often led by one or  two particularly aggressive voices in the class which is facilitated and controlled by a professor who occasionally, but not occasionally enough has something that isn’t just some written lecture to explain the material. While I love these classes and I love the material and even usually enjoy the discussions, I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t changes that need to be made, that could be made which would make our classes more accessible to everyone.

[luxmendax-deactivated20141206]

another reminder.

the world is heavy but your bones (just a cubic inch) can hold 19,000 lbs

ounce for ounce they are stronger than steel

atom for atom you are more precious than diamond

and stars have died so that you may live

you need to remember these things when you say that you are weak and worthless

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

Science, Gender, and the Construction of Truth

Being a "hard science" major while pursuing a minor in Gender & Women's Studies is definitely always interesting. Science, we're taught, is this end-all-be-all truth of the world, or at least some way of getting there, and yet there are all these suspicious holes and gaps that show the ways in which science in and of itself is just as constructed as all other studies. This was never as apparent to me as it was when I learned about sex reassignment surgery in babies. As Cheryl Chase wrote about in "Hermaphrodites with Attitude" and our guest lecturer spoke about yesterday, sex assignment at birth is pretty much arbitrary, defining sex through only centimeters of difference between genital sizes. As Chase notes, “Pediatric genital surgeries literalize what might otherwise be considered a theoretical operation: the attempted production of normatively sexed bodies and gendered subjects through constitutive acts of violence.”

And it really is a violence upon these bodies which we allow to happen over and over in the name of perceived truth. Because we perceive this existing binary as truth, it is only the pursuit of truth to “fix” bodies which do not fit. It’s ironic, really, that we commit violence against natural bodies to create “natural” sexes. Though science has much to offer, I find that science believes that lived experiences hold no real value. Science exists through numbers and statistics in a way that gender and sex really cannot. The results of this are a violent clash where cissexism prevails and those outside the binary lose.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

Response to A Classmate

One of my classmates made a post about our discussion of fantasy in our class and how this reminded them about the ways in which they feel they are constantly justifying themselves as "queer enough" based on their understanding of their gender and sexuality. This brought me to this blog post titled Femme Privilege Does Not Exist and the ways I've been struggling to figure out where I fit with my own gender, gender presentation, and sexuality.

In Femme Privilege Does Not Exist, the author discusses the problematic ways in which the femme identity is discussed, talking about, like my classmate, the problematic idea that there is a way to be "queer enough". The idea of so-called "femme privilege" comes from this idea that femme women don't present as queer, but that implies there is some way to present as queer, and there is no reason why being femme and being queer should be mutually exclusive. As a queer, often femme, woman, I've been thinking about this a lot as I navigate my own gender and fantasize, as my classmate does, about the possibility of being me as me. I have been pushing back and forth between feelings of masculine and feminine energies inside me attempting to find a happy medium, never really feeling quite right, and wondering if I present particularly femme one day if that makes me less queer and if that means the masculinity I feel means nothing or does not truly exist.

I'm not really entirely sure how all these things fit together, either. Like my classmate, I find myself wondering if I'm ever going to be comfortable with "identifying with all and nothing simultaneously". I guess until I do, I'll be fantasizing about when I can.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

In revisiting readings for the midterm this morning, I find myself thinking more and more about Wendy Brown's piece which we read earlier on in the semester and the questions it raises. One of my questions I have is how do we create a truly comprehensive curriculum for Gender & Women's Studies which actively makes space for everyone? Is it even possible? And even if we can create this curriculum, how do we teach it in a way that gives the theory applicable meaning in our real lives? I recently reblogged an open letter called "Dear Liberal Allies- what your college courses on oppression didn't tell you", and it really rang true to me. There are many times as I'm discussing issues of race or gender or sexuality, and it sometimes feels like while I am discussing my lived experiences the other person is discussing a theory they learned about once somewhere.

And herein lies another question I've been having. How do we bridge the gap between academic theory and lived experiences without ruining the integrity of either? We've had many discussions this semester about the accessibility of theory and the limitations of theory, and there's this continuous push and pull between balancing the academic with the experience. As I noted in a previous post, theory for me has often been a way to put names to the experiences I had all through my life, but it has been hard to bring back to those I know experienced these things with me. I see this disconnect between those with the academic jargon and know-how without a true understand of experence and those the other way around and I wonder how we connect the two to get everyone on board. I want to know if it's possible. Is it possible to really bridge this gap? I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.

[trunglesinperson]

Dear Liberal Allies – what your college courses on oppression didn’t tell you

I’m not angry or upset about anything in particular at the moment, but I thought I’d take a little time to write something out that had been bugging me about allies. It’s certainly not all-encompassing or totally comprehensive, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about in terms of being a good ally and a good neighbor, especially here on Tumblr.

Before you step in to help us out, I’d just like to clarify a couple things.

You and I, we may have taken the same seminars and maybe even read the same Audre Lorde excerpts or Ronald Takaki books, but know this: we learned very different things in very different ways 

For students of color, for gay students, for trans* students, for the children of immigrants and refugees, these classes aren’t always about learning new concepts when it pertains to us. It’s more about learning the names of things we already knew fairly intimately. Do you understand that? You learned it another way. You went in, you got this set of key words and a list of definitions. Your learning was, in all likelihood, “Here is this word. This is what this word means.”

For you, it was “Xenophobia: a strong fear or dislike of people from other countries.”

For us, it was “Xenophobia: the time that boy in my kindergarten class spat on me because I couldn’t speak English yet. Or when I saw that clerk yell at my mom in the grocery store because her English wasn’t clear enough. Or when USCIS had us confirm our American citizenship with the same set of papers seven times over the course of sixteen years because they wanted to confirm that we were, in fact, actual American citizens.”

For you, it was, “Racism: unfair treatment of people who belong to another race; violent behavior towards them.”

For us, it was, “Racism: that one time I saw that manager tell that sales girl to follow my dad around at Kohl’s. Or that one time my neighbor’s kid got shot by the police and they tried to cover it up by convincing everyone he was in a gang because he was Hmong, but we knew he wasn’t. Or that one time my dad told me I shouldn’t rollerblade to the library because I’m not white and it’s not safe for me.”

For you, it was, “Homophobia: a strong dislike or fear of homosexual people.”

For us, it was, “Homophobia: that time in the sixth grade when Ryan shoved me against a glass door and banged my face in it while yelling, ‘faggot!’ at me until the teacher stopped him. Or when my Catholic high school’s president told me that, though he loved me as a child of God, he still believed I was sinful when I suggested that we start a GSA.”

For you, it was: “Classism: prejudice or discrimination based on social class.”

For us, it was: “Classism: that one time when my best friend came over to hang out in high school and her parents didn’t want her to come over again because they didn’t like our neighborhood. Or that one time when my friends had no idea what food stamps looked like and I was too embarrassed to explain what they were.”

So while you were learning that these academically-framed phenomena were real problems, we were just getting little figurative nametags for awful things that we already knew. Your weekly vocabulary list was, to us, just a hollow shadow of our lived experiences.

So my point is this:

If you didn’t live an experience, then step aside. Because we knew this stuff before our professors told us what to call it. We learned it from the bottom up, you learned it from the top down, and that’s not even a metaphor.

When you step out of class, you get to be like, “Oh, awesome. I am learning how to be a good ally and a better human being. This will help me.” For us, it’s more like, “Ah, so that’s what they’re calling it nowadays. When exactly did they say change was going to come for us?”

So in practice, here’s what all this theory looks like: you don’t always have to speak. I mean, certainly, you should totally call someone out on their oppressive bullshit. But if you identify as male, you don’t get to tell people what is best for women as though you have that authority. If you’re white, you shouldn’t be trying to “uplift” people of color by the grace of your intellect or your words. Nobody’s looking to be ‘rescued’ or ‘pulled up from out of their unfortunate circumstances’ as you may be tempted to believe.

All anybody’s looking for in an ally is someone who knows that “empowerment” means taking a step aside in a place where you know you have privilege. And if it is, for example, a PoC-to-PoC conversation, a woman-to-woman conversation, a queer-to-queer conversation, etc. about this stuff, and that isn’t who you are, you don’t need to be chiming in.

Just take our word for it, let us talk, and let us vent. We’d like you to give us room, and if you have to be helpful, then help make room for us by giving up some of your proverbial social girth.

Because the bottom line is that our academia has made a commodity of our lived experiences as teaching moments for you. And if you think your academic knowledge is more valid than our lived experiences, then you’re definitely not part of the solution.

Much love.

[iloveyoursoul]

[caseyenglish-blog-blog]

Creating a "safe space" for everyone in GWS

This week in class we were asked to think about how to create a class environment that is welcoming and safe for folks.  Some thoughts that were discussed were sitting in a circle, going outside, riding out silences, and being aware of how much space is being taken up and by who.  While I think all of these are great ideas, I am skeptical that a “safe space” can be created in a class of so many people.  I have been thinking about how one person’s safe space might violate someone else’s.

A good example of this was when Professor Quinan brought up that sitting in a circle might not be ideal for everyone.  Clearly at least one person in the class felt more comfortable in a circle where you could see everyone and the professor wouldn’t be at the front of the room.  I appreciated that, even though no one voiced particular opposition, the professor acknowledged that everyone might not want to be seen in this class.

Overall, I think that it is nearly impossible to have a space that’s entirely safe when there are people who have different wants and needs in the group.  However, I do think that we can create a safer space.  One thing I have noticed in class is that certain people take up more space than others.  I would appreciate if folks were cognizant of the number of times they raise their hands and how their own privileges relate to that and contribute to the class dynamic.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

I've also been thinking about the creation of a "safe space" within a group like this and am also skeptical of creating a space that is always completely safe for everyone when there are multiple needs and when those needs can and often are opposing in nature. It's also difficult because power dynamics are inherently a part of the classroom. One example of this inherent dynamic is the professor- student dynamic which might be exacerbated by having our professor at the front of the class room, always standing in front of us, but would not disappear by virtue of not having that. These sorts of power dynamics hinder the ability to create spaces which are "safe".

As Casey has mentioned, there seem to be people who take up more space than others. I, too, would like for all of us to think critically about who is accessing space in the room, why, and how that might relate to those inherent power dynamics I mentioned earlier. I also want to think about how space is accessed and and who feels comfortable accessing it and I'd like to think about ways to make our space more accessible to everyone. One thing I might suggest to help create a more accessible space is some sort of way for those who don't necessarily want to speak out loud to still voice their opinions or otherwise participate in the conversations happening through some sort of anonymous online forum or something along those lines during class.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

This week, along with our debates and our readings, we've been asked to think about why we're here (in GWS), which I think, for me, is kind of funny after listening to the debates yesterday which seemed to center around accessibility of theory. As a queer woman of color, I find it almost inevitable that I would find my way to gender and women's studies in that feminist theory attempts to create ways for women to survive. Feminist theory has, in many ways, given me the tools to survive in a white, heteronormative, patriarchal world. As I discussed last week, many times I find the so-called "GWS Jargon" to be alienating, but also freeing. Feminist theory and GWS have given me the language to describe my lived experiences. Before I learned the words heteronormative and patriarchy and power and privilege, I had no way of communicating the ways in which they played out in my life. There were ideas and feelings of discomfort, but without the language, there was no connection between my feelings and reality. I think what draws me to feminist theory is exactly that- that through feminist theory and through what can sometimes be difficult language, I can validate my lived experiences and myself. Through feminist theory, I can point to words and ideas on paper and say, "This is my life." It validates me when I experience oppression through the words and the work of the feminists before me. What was previously complex language has become the tools through which I can express myself. The so-called complex words are only complex before the idea is explained. And so, I suppose, I'm here for the complicated language, the alienating jargon that for me has really become a source of validation of my person and my experiences and through that has become uncomplicated.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

"To claim that gender is a norm is not quite the same as saying that there are normative views of femininity and masculinity, even though there clearly are such normative views. Gender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has.” Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes. To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance."- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (p. 42)

Saying non-normative forms of gender are as much a part of gender performance and the gender binary is a pretty powerful claim to make, but an absolutely accurate one. It calls to question what makes a non-normative form of gender non-normative. After all, how can something be outside of the norm without a norm to begin with? Butler picks on this nature of a norm v. non-norm in her later chapter as well in her discussion of the case of David Reimer, saying “David claims, ‘I looked at myself and said I don’t like this type of clothing.’ To whom is David speaking? And in what world, under what conditions, does not liking that type of clothing provide evidence for being the wrong gender? For whom would that be true? And under what conditions?” (Butler, 70) She asks again, where do our perceptions of gender come from? What makes clothing the determining factor of gender? How does David determine that to be the determining factor? How do we as an audience? Once again, the fact that David can express his being outside of the norm comes from a norm existing. Because the gender binary exists, David and others can identify him as not belonging. However, once again, the question is where did it come from? This question made me think of these blog posts I saw recently which said "The gender binary is a tool of white supremacy, colonialism, and the white queer which exists vis-a-vis this system and depends on its existence for authenticity." In Gender & Women's Studies classes I've learned about "third gender" identities in "third world" countries and cultures, but the way "third gender" is used seems to be rooted in other-ness, and its other-ness rooted in colonialsm which sought to erase everything outside of the white gender binary and anything not directly white culture. This, to me, speaks to the last line from Butler which says the construction of a binary comes at the cost of those permutations which do not fit becoming a part of it.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

Do we still need feminist theory?

After the fall of my freshman year, I went home an entirely new person. After joining the Queer Straight Alliance here at Cal, I was thrust into a world where I was constantly learning about privilege and oppression and learning the ways in which both affected my life. Before Cal I was, for lack of a better term, basic. I was the kind of woman afraid to call myself a feminist because of the negative connotations of the word. I certainly knew there was a disparity between women and men, but the word feminist made me crazed. I equated the word feminist with extremist. It was only after I'd spent a semester at Cal that I realized how wrong I was. It was like all my life I'd been living in a haze, but then someone gave me a pair of glasses and it all came into focus. For the first time in my life, I could put words to feelings I'd had all along. The hurt I'd been carrying around with me because of my experiences as a queer woman of color suddenly had tangible words. This was mind-blowing to me. And this, of course, is all due to theory and the work of theorists before me. Theory and the academia surrounding it allowed for the creation of our "jargon" which makes tangible the ideas and feelings of oppression we experience. Undoubtedly, without feminist theory making its way into my life, I would still be without words to express my discomfort for the world around me. So, of course, when I went home to my family, I wanted to share my new knowledge. And, of course, I was met with resistance. I remember I had a conversation with my cousin, then also returning from her first semester at college, and I told her coming to Cal had turned me into a full-blown feminist. She shrugged and replied, "That's cool, I guess. But, like, I think there's inequality all around so I don't feel good about calling myself a feminist. Like, I believe in equality for everyone. I think there's  word for that, but I forget what it is, but, like, I wouldn't consider myself a feminist." I tried to respond that feminism is about equality, but she insisted she felt feminism only cared about women, that it was part of the word. When, in passing, I mentioned the Bechdel Test for movies, my sister scoffed and said, "Oh, great. You're not a feminist now are you?" When I said yes, she asked me why, and I told her I believed in equality. She replied, "Yeah, but aren't all feminists crazy?" To my family, the smell of the word feminist seems so awful the first "p" of "patriarchy" will send them running. And yet. And yet my sister was the first person to teach me that being a girl didn't mean I was limited to "girl" things. My father was the first person to teach me my body was my own and that I should never let anyone teach me differently. My mother was the first person to teach me the ways in which women could be strong. Even before I had even heard of Audre Lorde or Kimberle Crenshaw, I'd been learning feminist theory. I just never had the words for it. Of course, my education was incomplete, but it wasn't that I wasn't a feminist before I came to Cal, but that I hadn't realized that was the name for what I was.

So, to me, of course I still need feminist theory. I need the language to help bridge the gap between my thoughts and others. I need it to keep learning and keep educating myself so I can see better. And yet, I see feminist theory and its jargon which I hold so dear slowly creating and widening the rift of understanding between me and those I hold dear. In creating understanding for myself, I have creating an inability to communicate with others, and I think that's the struggle. The truth is, feminist theory is too often inaccessible. After all, how do I explain what the word "patriarchy" or "heterosexist" to my immigrant parents whom I can barely coherently explain the idea of Facebook message to? When born into a world where it is a privilege to understand what privilege is and be able to call it such, how do I even begin using feminist theory to explain anything to someone who hasn't learned the same words alongside me?  Someone in class today brought up the interesting question of how to deal with the disparity between what we want feminist theory to be and what feminist theory is. I don't know the answer, but I do know that I do need feminist theory in my life, but I need a feminist theory different than the one I understand now.

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market-capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature. The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

From Arundhati Roy's "Come September" speech

[standingwhereiamnow-blog]

The production of a new racial category, 'anyone who looks like a Muslim' in which targets of racism include Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, and any other people with olive or brown skin, exposes the arbitrary and politically constructed character of new and old racial categories in the U.S. It also reveals the inadequacy of U.S. multiculturalism to resist the hegemonic relationship between being 'white' and 'American'.

From "Transnational Feminist Practices against War" a statement by Paola Bacchetta, Tina Campt, Inderpal Frewal, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallen, and Jennifer Terry