Queer Youth Feel Unsafe in Canadian Schools

According to this article, a national survey of queer youth between grades 8 and 12 from across Canada reports that in school environments, a quarter have been targeted with threats of physical violence, half have faced verbal harassment, and more than two-thirds feel unsafe in their schools.

Some relevant paragraphs from the article:

The first national study of LGBT students in Canada has produced shocking results in a country that prides itself on diversity.

The survey of students from grades 8 through 12 was undertaken by Egale, Canada's national LGBT rights organization.

It found that more than two-thirds of LGBT students feel unsafe in their schools.

A quarter of the LGBT students said they had been victims of physical threats because of their sexuality. More than half said they had been verbally harassed.

Almost half have had malicious rumors spread about them on the internet or through text messages.

The survey found that harassment of LGBT students occurred at a rate almost twice that of heterosexual students.

Harassment is also affecting learning the survey found. More than a third of the LGBT students said they had skipped classes because of safety concerns.

"We may have human rights for LGBTQ people in Canada, but you'd never know it based on these results," said Helen Kennedy, executive director of Egale.

The survey was launched in December of last year, although some Roman Catholic schools refused to participate.

The survey was distributed in schools across the country - in large cities, small town, rural areas, and in schools on reserves and armed forces bases.

Running across this article was particularly timely, given that two days ago I received an email about ongoing efforts to pass an equity policy with respect to sexual orientation at the school board in the city in which I used to live. I don't know the details of the policy, and given my general understanding of how such policies come to be I'm sure I would want it to go farther and do more. However, I do know that a good friend was, for awhile, on the committee that was working on it, and I know that a local religious right organization (whose disgusting politics I had a few occasions to observe when I was doing independent journalism in that city) has been fighting tooth and nail at every step of the way to undermine, delay, and derail what I'm sure is only a small, partial step towards queer-positive schools.

Anyway. A survey such as this is an extremely blunt instrument for learning about pervasive experiences of oppression, and it has serious limits in its ability to make the true shape and scope of that oppression legible to anyone not already committed to seeing through the la-la-it's-all-okay illusions of Canadian liberalism. However, because of the ways they can be used in public debate, such numbers are still pedagogically and politically useful even if they do fail to capture the magnitude of the situation. And the fact is, they paint an extremely disturbing (if unsurprising) picture even without taking into account the likely limitations of the methodology.

ADDED AFTER INITIAL PUBLICATION:

I have a few minutes before I have to leave for a meeting, so let me add three ways that I see that the methodology is likely to be limited. Note that I don't know this for 100% sure, since all I know about the study I know from the linked news report, but I have some experience with working with the results of this general kind of data collection instrument in other contexts, so I think what I'm saying likely holds.

1. First is simple, straightforward undercounting of incidents. Given that you are measuring threat, lack of safety, danger, and shame, and finding there to be lots of those things, it is not a big leap to assume that, no matter how safe you try to make your methodology, some people will choose to be silent about these kinds of experiences.
   
2. Second is a more complex but no less real phenomenon rooted in the ways in which all of us as human beings are socially produced. The unsafe nature of the school space (and society more generally) will not just mean some people stay silent with surveyors about incidents that have happened to them and that they understand as heterosexist violence or harassment...it also means that some people will be damaged in ways that force them not to see, not to recognize, not to act on their own desires, causing a violence to their selves that they may be completely unable to recognize, and that will not be captured by a survey like this, but that is nonetheless profound. And it means that some people might develop internal narratives from experiences of desire and/or harassment that erase queerness and heterosexism, even if they can't help but notice that something is going on. (A related phenomenon is an analagous experience to what someone, I think Patricia Williams, has called the "spirit-murder of everyday racism" -- i.e. experiences of heterosexist erasure, denial, rejection that cannot be captured by questions looking for specific incidents that stand out from the background, but that rather are the (painful, traumatizing) background experience.)
   
3. Finally, it does not (as far as I can tell) account for differential experiences of danger within the very broad category of "LGBT." Some kinds of expression of queerness are more visible and/or more likely to be targeted for harassment and violence than others, and different intersections of sexuality with other identities will produce different experiences. I'm sure there are lots of ways that this plays out, but one that immediately occurs to me is that certain ways of doing "bi" or "queer" identities that give easy access to straight privilege mean that people who have access to that privilege will be less likely to experience and therefore to report violence and harassment, and also may be less likely to perceive and report lack of safety (though this is not guaranteed). This brings the average reported values for those things down dilutes the estimate of the danger.

This is all related to the inherent dangers in trying to distill really, really complicated relations and the experiences they produce into a few numbers.

Anyway...I'm sure I could do a much more thorough job of this, but I have to run...

Serpent River Says 'No' To Uranium Exploration

A First Nation not too far from Sudbury -- closer to Sault Ste. Marie, actually -- is taking a stand against uranium exploration and extraction on or near their territory:

Serpent River says 'no' to uranium exploration
By Rosalind Raby, The Sudbury Star

There is a battle brewing between a North Shore First Nation and the Ontario government when it comes to exploring for minerals in the area.

The chief of Serpent River First Nation said his band members do not want to see any uranium exploration of any kind on or near their territory.

"It has come to the point where we must insist on decisive action from the Ontario government on a list of matters pertaining to development in our traditional territory including the exploration of minerals, especially uranium," said Serpent River Chief Isadore Day (Wiindawtegowinini). "I'm concerned that private sector proponents for development are moving faster than government responses to consultation requirements for First Nations.

"It poses real challenges between industry and First Nations when government moves slower in First Nation negotiations than it does when pushing through proponent approvals for expropriation of Crown Lands."

He went on to say, "What's worse is that consultation and accommodation requirements are not even in the form of mutually agreed policy between the Crown and the First Nations, and yet government is approving land expropriation in favor of development in traditional lands."

Uranium exploration and potential development is a serious matter that the community has recently established a strong formal position on.

"We have experienced a number of tragic incidents with respect to uranium mining impacts in our community's history," stressed Day, "And, we are determined not to allow any of that damage to be inflicted upon our people or our lands ever again."

As settlers, we have to oppose the state's infringement on the rights of indigenous nations to determine their own future and control their own land. Support Serpent River's decision to say "NO"!

(From an email from AP.)

Review: Powers and Submissions

[Sarah Coakley. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.]

This book -- in contrast to most of the others that I have been reading as part of my arbitrary and very partial exploration of feminist theology for professional purposes (even though I myself do not identify as Christian) -- is, as far as I can tell, theology for theologians. It is thoroughly academic. Like much academic work, it assumes facility with a particular set of technical vocabulary and familiarity with some otherwise esoteric background material. In this case, they are a facility and a familiarity that I largely lack. However, I am a firm believer in dealing with a new area of learning by jumping in and figuring it out as you go, and this certainly helped me to do that.

My reaction to reading this book was quite mixed. On the one hand, though I may not have understood everything and certainly am not invested in many of the debates in which it intervenes, I did appreciate its sophistication and its willingness to engage not just with theology but also with material from non-theological philosophy and theory at various points. It is also closer to what I expected all of my reading in this area to feel like than has been the case.

On the other hand, there were important elements of the place from which Coakley was writing and of the stance she takes up that made me uncomfortable -- unfairly so, at least to a certain extent. For one thing, paying careful attention to this text allows you to get a sense of the author as being embedded in academic institutions and in religious institutions, but not really of organic connection to social spaces constituted by feminism-as-movement. This is not necessarily a problem -- I've learned plenty from people who are not themselves part of social movements -- but it is in striking contrast with some of the other things I've read in this area so far. In combination with the observation that this is the most recent volume I have yet read, it adds weight to my impression that the evolution of the relationship between theology and feminism parallels the relationship between the academy and the New Left movements more generally, i.e. a tendency over time towards professionalization, institutionalization, and some combination of individual disconnection from movement-as-base and demobilization of important parts of those movements.

I also got the sense of being put in the position of antagonistic other in my reading of this book. There was something in its tone that projected a mild sense that non-Christians are not just people grounded in different traditions with whom there is a responsibility to find ways to collaborate for justice and liberation, but are in some ways opponents. Admittedly, this may just be an instance of my indifference to religion being troubled by resonance with past observations of faith-based, self-righteous, sometimes-oppressive, in-groupery that occurred in a much different context. That is to say, I recognize that it may be unfair of me to react like this. The fact is that I want people whose work I read to be totally up front about what they consider to be the strengths of their analysis, and if they think that Christianity has something to offer, I want to hear about it. But there was something about a couple of the book's engagements with non-Christian thinkers that left a bad taste in my mouth. The examination of (secular queer feminist theorist) Judith Butler in conjunction with Gregory of Nyssa, a writer from the early centuries of Christianity, is intriguing, and I'm glad Coakley does it -- this "unlikely pair of interlocutors" would be interesting to relate to one another at greater length, despite the many centuries that separate them. However, I'm not sure her reading of Butler and her use of that reading to make some rather broad points about late 20th century and early 21st century theorizing around gender are entirely fair (not that I'm claiming more than a very superficial sense of what Butler has to say myself). As well, Coakley's treatment of post-Christian feminist theologian Daphne Hampson in the first chapter of the volume, though entertaining, is positively vicious in its own academic way. And I got the sense that part of why Hampson and Butler were found lacking is because they seek answers that do not include Christ.

I also thought it was hypocritical of Coakley to level the well-worn charge against Butler and post-modern theory more generally that it has contributed to conditions that make it harder for immediate, material struggles for justice to get cultural purchase and make progress, in contrast with older socialist narratives and the like -- I'm not sure too many activists on the ground would find Coakley's own brand of rarified theology to be much more directly useful to their work than Butler's opaque texts.

And that got me thinking about the project of theology more generally. From the perspective of concrete social change, I'm not sure what the point of theology is, or at least theology-for-theologians. I suppose it plays a role along with other discursive and material factors, in organizing the practices of religious institutions and, through that, of believers themselves. It is therefore a terrain of struggle than can have an impact. But it also made me think of various people I've known through the years who identify as Christian, and who may or may not have any truck with radical or progressive politics themselves. With one or two exceptions, I'm not sure very many of them would have any interest in theology of this sort, or feel any particular connection between it and their everyday practices and experiences of their faith. I'd be interested in hearing what theologians who prioritize justice and liberation, including feminists, have to say about that disjuncture.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Review: Becoming Divine

[Grace M. Jantzen. Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999.]

As I have made a point of repeating at the beginning of each review, I am currently reading a sampling of works in the field of feminist theology. This is not because I identify as Christian but for reasons related to my social movement history project.

Becoming Divine is a bit different from the other books I have read so far in that it is not feminist theology but feminist philosophy of religion -- I had not stopped to consider that theology and philosophy of religion were different, but of course they are. In the English-speaking countries, philosophy of religion has historically been almost entirely focused on Christianity, almost entirely occupied with demonstrating that various theological tenets of Christianity are or are not rationally justified, and by and large written by class-privileged white men. Jantzen aims to turn this on its ear, as her project is explicitly feminist, and it draws heavily upon philosophers in the continental European tradition -- Irigiray, Derrida, Levinas, Arendt, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, and others. Given the idiosyncratic trajectory of my political reading, my familiarity with these thinkers varies widely and is largely a result of what I have taken from various oblique encounters with them in the works of others. This book significantly contributed to that familiarity for a number of them. Beyond her appropriation of these continental theorists, at various points Jantzen also looks to feminist theologians, feminist philosophers of science, standpoint theorists, and medieval Christian female mystics, and of course draws exhaustively on the work of the traditional Anglo-American philosophers of religion whose field of activity she is trying unsettle and transform.

She begins by pointing out how traditional philosophy of religion assumes the existence of an unproblematic self, a la the autonomous, atomized individual of classical liberalism. She draws on the psycholanalytic work of Lacan and Irigaray (and Freud) to demonstrate how the self is produced. In some ways, it was this early section that I had the greatest difficulty accepting. I find it plausible that our selves are produced (at least in large part) by our entry into language, and that such an entry means joining a symbolic order that is organized in oppressive ways. I also appreciated Jantzen's insistence that this oppression is not absolute -- that the phallus is not a universal signifier, but one that has appropriated dominance, to use the language of the field. However, other supposed insights from psychoanalysis seemed a lot more dubious to me. Perhaps it just displays my own ignorance, but it seems to me that at least some of these "insights" are fanciful stories about things we simply cannot know, and whose main recommendation is a particular, academic kind of aesthetic appeal. But this hesitation did not undermine Jantzen's work for me.

She then moves on to appropriate Derrida's idea of deconstruction for use in her own way on traditional philosophy of religion. I particularly enjoyed her approach to the binaries "theism/atheism" and "religious/secular." She argues that simply rejecting the existence of Christianity's God or refusing to explicitly invoke Christianity in private or public life does very little to address the ways in which patriarchal religious imagery deeply structures our Western discursive and symbolic landscape. She argues that our inherited understanding of the divine plays a huge role in structuring our symbolic whether we as individuals happen to believe in the divine or not, and it is important for both secular and Christian feminists to be concerned about the ways in which this perpetuates gender and other oppressions. Her vision for a feminist philosophy of religion, therefore, is one which transforms our imaginary, our shared symbolic order, in liberatory ways.

An important part of this for Jantzen is dispensing with what has historically been the main task taken on by Anglo-American philosophers of religion, which is evaluating the truth status of various elements of Christianity using supposedly rational philosophy. She turns a critical eye to philosophy of religion more generally, and at least begins the task of showing how it denies that its institutional and disciplinary boundaries and mandates are in any sense socially constructed or infused with questions of power, though this is a task she says she wishes to continue in another book. She talks about how the obsession with defending or attacking various Christian truth-claims leaves intact the symbolic order that does so much to structure the space we have to think and talk about the world.

Instead, she argues that we should attend to desire when it comes to questions of divinity. This does not assume either a theist or an atheist position, but it deemphasizes that particular question. How we conceptualize the divine, whether we believe in it or not, expresses our vision of what is great and good and important and valuable. By challenging the masculinist assumptions that structure our vision of the divine and being deliberate about projecting more liberatory desires into the divine, it is possible to begin creating a new religious symbolic that is liberatory and that serves to support our own quest to, in her words, "become divine."

After a useful discussion of the complex possibilities for grounding this new imaginary in women's experience (including dealing with some key points relating to epistemologhy, standpoint theory, and the workings of power that I see as key as well to anti-oppression politics) Jantzen sketches out in more detail what she understands of our current religious symbolic and what she hopes a feminist version will include. In particular, the Western imaginary in general and Christianity in particular are heavily invested in imagery related to death -- it is the next world that matters, not this; spirit and flesh are separate and spirit is superior.

Whether in the traditional religious form of looking towards heaven and treating this life merely as a preparation for the better one, or in the secular form of space-flights and telescopes, or even in the intellectual form of preoccupation with the possible worlds of modal logic, all this attention to the worlds of the beyond distracts attention from the actual world in which we live, and our responsibilities to it and to one another. When this is coupled with the age-old linkage of the fmela with the material and the male with the rational spirit, the sexist nature of the desire to master and ultimately to escape from matter is evident. [130]

Instead, she encourages an imaginary based in natality. By glorifying birth and what follows it rather than death and what may or may not follow that, we begin from a place that focuses on living, on groundedness, on attentiveness to experience and interconnectedness. Natality

is not a matter of a romantic exaltation of women as mothers; still less is it a reduction of 'woman' to the function of mothering. Rather, it is the shift of Gestalt that recognizes that the weaving of the web of life to which each person enters in virtue of our natality means that we are connected with all other persons, female and male. Our sexuate selves, born of women, are the basis both of our similarity to and our difference from other sexuate selves, the foundation both empathy and of respect for alterity. This connectedness with all others, while allowing for great diversity, can therefore be recognized as the material basis of ethical responsiveness, a responsiveness which must be grounded in the imaginary and worked out in symbolic and social structures. [150]

An important part of her understanding of an imaginary of natality is that instead of focusing our attention of salvation, its limits, and its possibilities, as in our current imaginary, it instead draws our attention to the importance of "flourishing." Instead of an atomized individual that will or will not be saved based on individual beliefs and/or behaviours, we would see ourselves as individuals-within-networks who value our own flourishing and those of others, and precisely because we see ourselves as contextual beings, our own flourishing requires that we be attentive to the flourishing of others.

From what I have said above, it might seem as though the model of flourishing would lead one to emphasize only the public and the political at the expesnse of the private and inner life. Closer attention to the metaphor, however, shows that that would not be the case. A plant which flourishes does so from its own inner life, 'rooted and grounded' in its source. If that inner life is gone, the plant withers and dries up, no matter how good its external circumstances may be. What is different from the model of salvation, however, is that the inner and the outer are not separable: there is no flourishing 'soul' of the plant while its 'body' withers in intolerable material conditions. A philosophy of religion built on the model of flourishing is one whose spirituality is holistic, rather than the privatized, subjectivized spirituality so characteristic of contemporary Christianity. It is therefore one in which natality is deliberately evoked in the task of becoming divine. [170]

After a further consideration of language and how it relates to philosophy of religion, Jantzen gets into the important issue of criteria for evaluating possible philosophies of religion. We are often told we must choose between universal, supposedly objective evaluation of "truth", a la traditional philosophy of religion, and complete relativism, in which there is no way to evaluate or critique anybody's claims to anything. Jantzen advances the idea that we must base a philosophy of religion on contextual bases, and see our criteria not as ontological but as ethical and political and consciously partial, embodied, and situated. She recognizes that philosophy of religion as it currently exists is based on values, emobidment, and situatedness in community, its practitioners just refuse to admit it. She says that we just need to be open about that, and to move forward based on criteria of trustworthiness, accountability, and a recognition of the partial nature of our truths. In this discussion, she touches on a lot of issues relating to politics of knowledge that are of great importance beyond just philosophy of religion.

In the second-last chapter she appropriates ideas from Emmanuel Levinas and puts them to feminist uses. In particular, she uses his notion that we must begin to understand the world not from ontology but from ethics as a tool "for a feminist religious symbolic which is neither reductionist nor fixated on an onto-theological realism centred in the 'god called God [253, references in original]." She closes the book by examining more closely the "becoming" part of "becoming divine." She reinforces the idea that "the divine cannot simply be the 'god called God', the static divinity whose attributes traditional philosophers of religion discuss in endless debates on the 'coherence of theism.' Divinity in the face of natals is a horizon of becoming, a process of divinity ever new, just as natality is the possibility of new beginnings. And it can never be immune from response to suffering in the face of the natals and of the earth. [254, references in original]"

She concludes that such a philosophy of religion must be pantheistic -- that is, it must see the divine in everything. She argues that this allows for us to overcome the immanent/transcendent binary by assuming a transcendence that emerges from the immanent. "To have the capacity for transcendence does not entail having the capacity, now or in the future, to become disembodied, but rather to be embodied in loving, thoughtful, and creative ways. [271]"

She concludes,

[T]he western masculinist symbolic has been constituted and guaranteed by the postulation of a locus of being and truth outside the world, from which the world and all that is in it is derivative. The world functions, on this economy, as the sign of an absence, an absence which is overcome by reason's access to a disembodied and mastering truth. Now if we take instead a pantheist symbolic in which that which is divine precisely is the world and its ceaselessly shifting bodies and signifiers, then it is this which must be celebrated as of ultimate value. It is within the world, not in some realm beyond it -- whether in Platonic forms, a heaven that we might reach after bodily death, or other galaxies that we might fly to in a spaceship -- that the horizon of our becoming must occur. Instead of a gesture of necrophilia, a pantheist symbolic supports a symbolic of natality, a flourishing of the earth and those who dwell upon it...From the discussion of this chapter it is possible to see how this is all of a piece with the wider aim of becoming divine, and responding to the divine in the face of the Other.

But still, why call it pantheism? Would it not be more honest just to admit that what we have here is an abandonment of theism, a thinly disguised secularism? After all, this is hardly a postulation of an omni-everything Lord God, its only difference from classical theism being that this God is embodied in the material universe. I have argued elsewhere that the tenets of classical theism would indeed be compatible with the doctrine of God embodied in the universe; but my suggestion here goes much further. The idea of divine embodiement can be seen, I have argued above, not merely as an adjustment to classical theism, but as a disruption of the dualistic and hierarchical western symbolic, which western secularism largely leaves in place.

The insistence upon pantheism therefore returns to the importance of the symbolic and the urgency for a feminist recognition of the divine as a feminist recognition as a horizon of becoming, exploring the embodied, earthed, female divine as 'the perfection of our subjectivity.' Hence, as Irigaray reminds us, there is strategic value in rethinking religion rather than in acquiescing in an already masculinized secularism, not 'awaiting the god passively, but bringing the god to life through us' -- through us and between us, embodied, transcendent, the projection and reclamation of ultimate value, the enablement of subject-positions as women, natals becoming divine. [pp. 274-5, emphasis as in original, references in original]

Despite, or perhaps because of my own ambivalence towards religion, this book very much impressed me, though it left me with a lot of political and theoretical questions. I take to heart its point that all of us have a reason to be concerned with transforming the current symbolic order, with its saturation in death and masculinist domination in ways tightly tied to traditional Christianity, whatever our position with respect to specific truth-claims made by this or that form of Christianity. At points, anyway, I felt some resonance with things I said about my own relationship to religion in this post. For instance, my reluctance to take a side in the Christian vs. atheist binary was connected to an undertheorized sense that however much I might not identify with the former, embracing the latter would still be in some sense defining myself in its terms. I also found the glimpses of an imaginary based on natality to be very inviting, and I can see how working towards such a symbolic order can be part of more obviously material and less discursive efforts to transform the world. And, self-educated lefty book nerd that I am, I appreciated the chance to get acquainted with a few more corners of the works of big names from Europe.

Some of the more obvious and simplistic critiques often levelled at the traditions from which Jantzen draws in this work include the idea that the emphasis on omnipotent discourse renders resistance impossible, and that it denies the relevance of the material by sucking everything into discourse. She explicitly rejects both of these, though her claims to do so are more compelling in the case of the former, I think. She argues quite forcefully that though the symbolic order is organized in very fundamental ways in the service of domination, it is still possible to create spaces of ambiguity from which never-simple resistance can begin and can ultimately create transformation. This made me think of John Holloway's writing about being within-and-against capitalism. The erasure of the relevance of the material world is also something in which she refuses to be complicit, but how exactly she sees the relationship between the discursive and the material, and how that should inform our actions in both spheres, is not at all clear to me.

One minor point that caused me a bit of anguish was her dismissal of interest in other worlds as inherently tied up in masculinist flight from the body and denial of and desire to dominate the current world. I certainly know what she means -- there is certainly lots of science fiction that is easily understood as using technology instead of God to provide a sort of external-to-humanity salvation that supports a social order that is treated as benign or even idyllic when an attentive reading reveals that it assumes domination of various sorts. But that is far from everything that can be found in fiction that looks to other worlds. Such fiction can also stimulate the imagination about what a better this-world might look like, and sharpen our desire to make it so. It can be one way in which our imaginary saturated with death and domination can be undermined a little bit, for a moment, in ways that advance our capacity to imagine different ways of thinking.

I also am not sure how to understand the text's relationship to oppressions other than gender oppression. On the one hand, there are places where she considers the multiple and interlocking nature of oppressions in considerable detail, and plenty of others where she at least mentions it. But there are still plenty of times where the language she uses seems to fall into a privileging of gender. If, as sometimes seems to be the case, gender is used as an example and metaphor of complex, multifaceted, interlocking dominations in discourse (which are, in ways not really explained, tightly bound to material oppressions), then it makes a certain sense, but that doesn't seem to be explicitly stated and I'm not sure what to make of it. Why on earth use language that at times seems to be gender-only or gender-first, when you give so much evidence of knowing it's a lot more complicated than that at other places in the text?

And finally, I always have questions about how useful intense theory like this really is. I mean, I read it and I found serious challenges and useful new ideas and cause for hope, but this is not a book that very many people are going to read. And if that is the case, what impact can it be expected to have? And perhaps more importantly, how should I or anyone else who reads this book but is not themselves a theologian or philosopher of religion relate this to what we do? How should we relate it to what is most urgent about the ways in which Christianity is currently done in the world? Or to the ways in which the secular version of the same overarching symbolic contributes to domination?

I just don't know. But perhaps, as I do various kinds of writing in the coming years, the good hard kick to the symbolic that this book delivered will perhaps inspire me to do things a little differently, to play with language and ideas in ways that contribute at the microscopic level to birthing a symbolic of natality from the interstices of our current symbolic of death and domination.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

The Politics of Hip Hop: Sudbury Launch for Upping the Anti #6

Check out the sixth issue of the radical political journal Upping the Anti. Here in Sudbury we are having a launch event called "The Politics of Hip Hop" on May 14. Our event will involve several speakers, discussion, and music videos, and is sparked by the new issue's interview with Mutula Olugbala (aka M-1) from the revolutionary hip hop duo Dead Prez.

First I'll give you a bit more info on the current issue, then I'll paste in some details on the launch event here in Sudbury.

As is always the case, this issue has some really great content. Along with the interview of M-1, I'm particularly excited about the interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (which a friend here in Sudbury did) and the anti-poverty roundtable from Halifax. And I'm also pleased that a book review by yours truly of Canada's Economic Apartheid is in there, as well as one by another Sudbury friend of Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology. As also seems to have become the routine, I have some political problems with the editorial in this issue, but don't let that dissuade you!

Here is the full table of contents:

Introduction

Interviews

Mutulu Olugbala: It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop
Roxanna Dunbar-Ortiz: The Opposite of Truth is Forgetting
George Katsiaficas: Remembering May 1968

Articles

Joshua Kahn Russell & Brian Kelly: Giving Form to a Stampede: The First Two Years of the New SDS

Eric Newstadt: Accounting for the Student Movement

Caelie Frampton: Response to Newstadt

Jeff Monagham & Kevin Walby: The Green Scare is Everywhere

Roundtables

Kriss Sol: Organizing Against the G8 with Hanne Jobst, Sabu and Go, Miranda and Jaggi Singh.

Alex Khasnabish: Anti-Poverty Organizing in Halifax with Jill Ratcliffe, Capp Larsen, Angela Weal, Susan Lefort, Cole Webber, and James Babbitt.

Book Reviews

David Calnitsky: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Alexis Shotwell: Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology.

Chris Keefer: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. INCITE! (ed.).

Scott Neigh Grace-Edward Galabuzi, Canada’s Economic Apartheid.

For the launch event, we decided to use one of the stronger pieces in the issue as a jumping off point to try and create a space in which discussions could happen that would not otherwise happen here in Sudbury. Here are the details:

The Politics of Hip Hop: a launch event for Upping the Anti #6

Join a discussion of hip hop sparked by "Its Bigger Than Hip Hop," an interview with Mutula Olugbala (M-1) from the revolutionary hip hop duo Dead Prez in Upping the Anti 6. This event will include speakers, discussion, and music videos.

With presentations by:

Shana Calixte: "Your Revolution Will not Happen Between these Thighs": Forwarding a Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy. Shana, queer mom/black feminist/academic, is a lecturer in the Women’s Studies department at Laurentian University.

Robin Desmeules: Who May Play? Investigating Hip Hop and Identity. Robin is a student and musician from the Sudbury area with a passionate interest in the ways that music and politics intersect.

Kaili Beck: Music and the Movement: Using Music as Pedagogy for Social Change. Kaili is a professor of Sociology and Labour Studies at Laurentian University and a consumate music fan.

Alex-Rev: Visions of Hip Hop: Striking a Balance. Alex-Rev is an Original Guerrilla with Common Cause and Sudbury Against War and Occupation, a fan of RBG hip hop, and a helping hand with indigenous rebellion.

Wednesday, May 14, 7:00pm, Laurentian University, Class Room Building, Room C-304

The Class Room Building is located between the Library and the Arts Building at Laurentian University. This is a wheel-chair accessible location. For travel and childcare subsidization, general information, or if you need a ride from downtown to the event and back, be in touch with me.

Upping the Anti is a radical journal of theory and action which provides a space to discuss unresolved questions and dynamics within the anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialist politics of today’s radical left in Canada. For
more information, go to www.uppingtheanti.org.

Check out the event if you are local, and check out the issue no matter where you are!

Quote: Ground Yourself

Think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent superworldly God; then you can be sure that your ideas are unities of being and thought.

-- Ludwig Feuerbach

Review: Womanspirit Rising

[Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, editors. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979.]

For the next installment in my random jaunt into feminist theology -- which I am doing in the service of my social movement history project and not because I identify as Christian -- I went back to what seems to be something of a classic early survey of the field. It is a high energy mixture of reprinted material from names that even I have heard, like Mary Daly and Starhawk, and original material from young activist-scholars struggling to synthesize their faith and their politics. With sections on the feminist critique of existing theology, examination of relevant history/herstory, efforts to reform existing religious traditions in feminist ways, and exploration of creating radically new traditions, it feels like an attempt to put together a reasonably complete crash course for feminists newly searching for answers.

Many of the things that stood out the most for me in reading this book are, I think, features of the era in which it was produced. They were particularly visible in direct comparison to the somewhat more recent volume I just reviewed. Both volumes, for instance, acknowledge kinship between Christian feminist theology and post-Christian (often Goddess-oriented) feminist theology as well as real differences, but this volume includes much more of the latter and seems more interested in treating them as different answers arrived at by different women who started from much the same place and are on similar journeys. I would imagine this reflects a gradual erosion of the sense of common purpose among feminists who made different choices about how to deal with experiences of disjuncture between their faith and their feminism. As well, though both volumes are political by any meaningful standard and both contain scholarly material, this one has a much more boisterous, activist tone to it, while the later one is definitely more academic. It is not uniform across all of the essays, but in this one there is more of a sense of feminism-as-movement, while you can see a significant shift towards feminism-as-shared-discourse but less centrally as movement (at least for the authors) in the other.

A number of political problems with this book also take the visible forms that they do in part because of the era in which it was written. A key example is the subtitle: A Feminist Reader in Religion. If taken literally, this phrase might create expectations of a much broader project than the volume actually realizes. Though it claims the general category "religion," it is specifically a book about Christianity, Judaism, and Goddess-oriented spiritualities that some women from both of those traditions have adopted. And though this is always a risky area for speculation when noone self-identifies, it seems pretty clear that all of the voices that it publishes from within those traditions are the voices of white women. As well, and not surprisingly, it deploys some key feminist concepts from that era -- things like "sisterhood" and "consciousness raising" -- in ways that do not account for subsequent challenges to how they do or do not deal with diffference among women.

That said, there was something about the energy of the book that I found quite engaging, even though it was kind of disorienting for me. It was disorienting, I think, because of the passion many of the contributors felt for answering questions that I feel no particular impulse to ask. The book, while recognizing that this is an oversimplification, roughly divided feminist efforts to transform religion between those which aim to reform existing traditions and those which it describes as "revolutionary," which seek to found new traditions. On the level of relating to imagery, text, and doctrine, I find the "revolutionary" approach much easier to understand as a strategic choice. But I really do not understand the need which drives it. At the level of experienced need, I have a much easier time understanding the need that the "reformist" contributors exhibit to remain a part of the traditions in which they were raised. At least in part, that need is a social need, a need to belong, a need to remain meaningfully connected to loved ones and to a larger social community. I get that. Of course, the "revolutionary" contributors experience that social need as well, and find it met in the new communities which they form. But they also make more visible that all of these contributors experience not just social need but also a need that is filled by ritual, myth, imagery, and collective stories. That is what I find harder to understand. And I'm not sure why. I mean, on an intellectual level I certainly get how important all of those things can be. And I can even see how I meet those needs in myself by looking to spaces and practices that are not religious, so perhaps it is just that the places that they look feel unfamiliar to me. But I think it is not just lack of familiarity -- they seem to feel a need for a coherence in ritual, myth, imagery, and collective stories that I don't experience, and a need for some sort of metaphysical content that I not only do not feel like I need but that I would find actively off-putting.

All of that takes on a more collective, political dimension when I connect it back to reflections about the era in which the book was written versus the present day. It is quite clear from the ways in which these women write about their spiritualities that they see themselves as doing that work in the context of a broader movement, and creating resources that will provide spiritual sustenance for individual women in that movement as well as creating opportunities for greater cohesion and therefore greater political accomplishment for the movement as a whole. But I'm not sure it has really worked out that way. I know they made important inroads in certain aspects of mainstream Protestant Christianity in Canada at an institutional level, and have created resources that Christian feminists in various denominations have found useful. I also have known women with a committed, Goddess-centric religious practice of one sort or another. So the work done by these pioneers persists. But given the ways in which feminist movements have changed in the intervening years in terms of how they are socially organized and what they do, I think these resources are currently used only by isolated pockets and not in the generalized way that I think their creators hoped. Why is that? Perhaps just a shift in the times. Perhaps the creators just dreamed too big, as I think all creators should do. But it may have to do with what it means to do work at the level of myths and symbols in the service of social change...and I'm not quite sure what I mean by that, but I think it means both accepting that such work is an important part of social change but also recognizing that shared myths and symbols can really only emerge organically through shared struggle, and even then it will happen in unpredictable ways. As well, we need to recognize that political collaboration in the absence of that kind of sharing is going to be fundamental to any project of social transformation -- there is no way that everyone we will need to work with is going to think like us at that level. So investing too much hope in cohesion through shared myth and symbol is also a political risk.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Short Quote: History

History, therefore, is nothing but a compilation of the depositions made by assassins with respect to their victims and themselves.

-- Simone Weil