Change Requires a Path

It should be obvious: In order to make a change, we need some way to make it, some path to bring it to reality.

I don't like that dead tree in the middle of my back yard? Well, I need some way to take it down -- a chainsaw, an axe, a helpful ogre who can push it over, something.

Similarly, if you want a world without poverty, a world in which patriarchy and white supremacy are dimly remembered relics of a depressing past, a world in which torture no longer happens in our name, a world in which war over power and resources can no longer be disguised as wars about religion or 'civilization' and in fact no longer happen at all -- in order to get there, or even to make non-trivial steps in that direction, we need a path.

Now, by "path" I don't mean something that has been sketched out in every detail in advance. Wanting that is a trap, I think, and claiming to have it is a lie and a threat. We just need a general sense of how we might get from A to B. Importantly, a path needs to be potentially effective and it also needs to feel plausible to a significant number of people. Efficacy is obvious: I can be super enthused about using a banana peel to cut down the dead maple tree, and maybe even everyone in my neighbourhood is into that idea too, but that still won't make it work. Plausibility is less obvious: Unlike cutting lumber, social change requires not just that the path have a chance of being effective but that lots of people believe that it might be effective, and believe it strongly enough that they get involved. It can be a great path, a beautiful path, a path to great and wondrous things, but if nobody else thinks it will work, it just isn't going to happen.

Our opponents know this. In writing about the history of the U.S. empire, Noam Chomsky has talked about "the threat of the good example," by which he explains the immense effort used by the U.S. at various points to attack and undermine any and every instance of peoples trying to do things differently, trying to carve out a way forward for themselves that involved anything that was not dependent on U.S.-dominated capitalism. U.S. elites often claimed it was in opposition to Communism, but that was only occasionally true, and more often it was some sort of independent, socialist-inflected nationalism that was the target. Grenada or Vietnam or Cuba did not pose even a tiny threat to global capital in and of themselves; the problem was that the example of successful resistance to capital might inspire others, and so the empire's resources had to be employed to undermine them, however many might die in the process. In other words, an example of successful resistance might make a particular path of resistance seem more plausible, and lead others to embark upon it as well.

The same logic has been used in crushing domestic dissent at various points. The field isn't quite as monolithic when it comes to domestic movements on Turtle Island, because for various reasons and at various points in the last seventy years, elites have been unable or unwilling to simply crush movements and so certain kinds of "good examples" managed to take root. Generally these have involved both real victories and co-optation -- the development of welfare states was a victory for (at least some) ordinary people, but was a strategic concession by elites in order to stave off the threat of revolution and to support profits; endorsing a certain kind of institutional strength among the white working class by inviting them to be nominal junior partners not only shaped how that strength would be used, but also bound the white working class into a system that ravenously consumes racialized people (and smaller proportions of poor white people) at home and abroad; and the more elite-palatable slices of some of the movements that became particularly visible in the late '60s and after were funded, institutionalized, and channeled into safe directions and away from more radical roots and allies. Still, there are plenty of examples, even when it comes to dissent by the more privileged layers among oppressed and exploited people, in which a reform that could have been conceded, within the logic and resources of social relations at the time, was instead refused in order not to provide a potentially infectious "good example." And certainly one simple explanation for how struggle circulates during high points, like the late 1960s and early 1970s, is through people seeing that a given path of struggle works for some other group, and then adapting it to their own purposes.

Plausible and Effective?

I think part of the evil genius of neoliberalism is that it has created a situation in which potentially effective paths are rendered implausible and the only plausible paths are ones that are never going to be effective.

For lots of people, I think there are no paths to a better world that they find even remotely plausible. This is tragic and inaccurate, I think, but it has a real material basis and isn't just some kind of intellectual error. "There is no alternative" was not just a Thatcherite slogan, not just a lie to fool people into giving up, but a commitment by elites to create material circumstances in which alternatives became less and less plausible and to push people's judgments about plausibility solely into paths that would provide only minimal threats to established power and privilege.

I can come up with three paths that still have some plausibility beyond tiny slivers of the population: liberal political parties; passive membership organizations, service organizations, and other NGOs; and individual-level activities like ethical consumption, individual anti-racist and anti-sexist practice, and so on.

I won't try to exhaustively demonstrate why I think those three paths are inadequate and/or ineffective, but I'll say a few things about each. And, incidentally, in saying that they are ineffective, I mean something quite specific: They are not capable of creating change that is proportionate to the magnitude of the problems in question, such as those enumerated in the third paragraph of this post. This doesn't necessarily mean they are useless or bad. It doesn't mean that each don't sometimes do positive things. I do at least some things encompassed by these three paths, from time to time.

For instance, take supporting liberal political parties (under which I would include the NDP, given that one outcome of neoliberalism is that social democratic parties no longer have the space to be anything other than moderately more compassionate and honest liberal parties -- that is, when they aren't leading the neoliberal charge themselves.) As I've argued before, voting matters, in a very proscribed and limited way, so we need to do it, though it is important that we do it without illusions. It can make a small but real difference in the lives of some people which party wins, but no liberal or nominally social democratic party is even claiming it will do anything more than take the edge off the hideous violence of our current social relations, though some party faithful manage to delude themselves into thinking otherwise. In the last thirty years, which party wins is more a matter of the rate at which things get worse. I generally do vote NDP, and think, given the particular circumstances in which I am voting and given that it costs me only about thirty minutes of my time once every few years, it is worth doing. So support for these parties has a fairly broad plausibility, but is not and will not be very effective at doing more than blunting some of the worst of the nastiness that surrounds us.

Non-governmental organizations of various stripes -- I'm thinking primarily of social service agencies and passive membership issue-based organizations -- are similarly limited. Agencies meet immediate needs, which is vital, and we should definitely support their ability to do that in the absence of more politically useful alternatives. But meeting needs is not the same thing as addressing root causes. My own time working in that sector taught me that the space that exists for agencies to exert pressure within the system can be important for making the most of sparse welfare state dollars, but that will always be vastly inadequate to the scale of the problems we face. Passive membership organizations that address a specific issue can also accomplish some useful things within particular bounds. For instance, though each has its own political strengths and weaknesses, GreenPeace and EGALE and The Council of Canadians, say, have all done some useful things in the last couple of decades. But the kinds of problems that they can productively take on, given their organizational form and their particular approaches to creating change, are within narrow bounds. Despite their plausibility to a certain segment of the broader public, NGOs can only address the issues we face in particular, limited ways.

And another popular approach is one that focuses on activities that are most often individual in scale, things like ethical consumption and changes to interpersonal practices in terms of race and gender and so on. Again, these are not bad things, and I do some of them myself. Indeed, they can be important elements of building more collective approaches to change, as described below. But when they stay at the level of individual practices, there are serious limits to what they can accomplish. A boycott might get McDonald's to change some of its packaging, say, but it won't ever make it stop being McDonald's. And a guy learning to be anti-sexist in his partnerships and other relationships is an important step, but on its own the challenge it represents to social relations of gender oppression is distinctly limited.

Movements

Social movements -- that is, efforts to create change that are overt and collective, and often confrontational -- can be effective. We just need to look at history to see what collective movements that are not afraid to act in oppositional ways can accomplish, whether that is the labour movement, women's movements, anti-racist movements, national liberation movements, or lots of others. They aren't perfect, they rarely accomplish all of what they set out to accomplish, but they can do a great deal.

Social movements, because of how they are socially organized, are less likely to be limited in the ways that the paths above are. At their best, the standpoints of movements are grounded in the everyday experiences of the ordinary people that create them. At their best, they refuse to accept the constraints that limit the political imaginations embodied in electoral parties, NGOs, and change work that occurs exclusively at the individual level. Because movements can grow and in a certain sense create their own space of possibility, even movements that start out being about limited and local reforms can -- not necessarily will, but can -- lead to much broader social transformation. And because (at their best) they are participatory, they can change not just policies or organizations 'out there' but can transform those of us who are involved and can be a crucible for generating new ways of living much more fundamentally than tinkering with this law or that policy. That doesn't mean they always do these things, but there are definitely historical precedents, and GreenPeace or the NDP simply do not offer that potential.

Despite that history and that possibility, movements aren't very plausible vehicles for change in North America right now. I think there are lots of reasons for this. For one thing, the plausibility of movement participation as a path to a better world depends to a certain extent on the strength of movements. A whole host of circumstances mean movements are, by and large, quite weak, so it makes sense that lots of people don't see movements as a useful path, which makes movements even weaker.

This implausibility of movements as a path is also connected to the kinds of changes that have come along with neoliberalism in the last few decades. Between the end of the Second World War and, say, the mid '90s, there was a kind of social democratic safety valve, such that if there was a certain amount of momentum building up in a particular movement, elites were somewhat open to certain kinds of concessions even if those concessions were counter to the general logic of (classical) liberalism and/or the market. This safety valve is, if not completely broken, at least fastened much more tightly, as a deliberate part of the neoliberal agenda of clawing back past gains. More generally, there is a climate that is less open to concessions and more interested in rolling back past gains made by ordinary people. This is true not only of the state and employers, but in more dispersed areas like gender justice and anti-racism as well. Accompanying all of this has been a shift towards increasingly repressive approaches to policing dissident movements and protests in the last fifteen years.

All of which is to say that there is a material basis for people finding movements less plausible than at earlier moments: movements are weaker and elites have demonstrated greater willingness to refuse and repress. This means that achieving a given goal through social movement activity today requires greater effort, greater risk, and probably exploring new ways of doing things such that inaccurate but longstanding ideas of what "social movement" and "protest" have to mean are no longer enough. All of this makes movements much less plausible as a path for a lot of people.

What do we do?

Rebuilding movements will require lots of things, but one is working to make movements a more plausible path towards change in the minds of more people in North America. I can see three things that will contribute to that.

1. Focus on movement building that seeks to build from what people are already doing. All of us have moments of resistance in our everyday lives, moments in which we refuse to act according to the oppressive logics that organize our social relations, in which we refuse our own dehumanization or we refuse to be complicit in the dehumanization and violence experienced by others. It is connecting to those moments that is the most basic antidote to the implausibility of movements: "You're doing that and I'm doing this, so why don't we get together and talk about it and do something together?" I'm not sure that those of us with radical politics and considerable privilege are always very good at doing this, but it has to be the basis of moving forward, because that connection with everyday experience and everyday resistance is, I think, central to piercing the "there is no alternative" paralysis that keeps all effective paths towards change from seeming plausible.
   
   
2. Those of us with energy that is not totally consumed with struggles for our own survival and liberation need to make decisions about expending that energy such that active local struggles actually win. Arguing that movements are the only way forward might be useful, but demonstrating that they can actually achieve gains for ordinary people is much more likely to be convincing. So put a high priority on actively supporting the strike going on in your city, the struggle against the city council decision to pave over a meadow, the anti-poverty and immigration-related direct action casework -- whatever it is, use your energy and your resources and your privilege to contribute to victories, because victories create plausibility for movements.
   
   
3. Work to create a culture of social justice, a culture of resistance. By that I mean we should model ways of living which assume that working to create movements for social justice is important, useful, and entirely ordinary. Build community with this idea in mind. Talk and write blogs and 'zines and other media with this as a built-in assumption. And resist the urge to do it in insular, disconnected ways (a la, for example, certain big-A Anarchist communities) -- rather, seek to inject this sense wherever possible into ordinary life.

Now that I write them, these three suggestions seem woefully inadequate. I suppose it is important to read them in light of broader discussions of revitalizing movements and doing all of the things that come out of those discussions in order to make our movements more vibrant and effective, because efficacy and plausibility reinforce each other. In any case, though they seem like tiny steps compared to what we face, I still think that grounding our work in everyday experience, pushing for small victories, and living an ordinary, non-insular, but integrated-into-life culture of social justice and liberation are at least small parts of what it will take to breath new life into social movements in North America.

Feelings About Masculinity

I was recently puzzling over why I was having such difficulty doing a particular piece of writing. Everything I tried felt a little off key, a little false, and I couldn't understand it. It slowly dawned on me that the explanation was that I couldn't write authentically about the topic at hand without setting it in a different and broader context -- that is, without talking at least briefly about my feelings about masculinity. I've written about masculinity before, but I've never focused on my emotional relationship to it, so I set that post aside for the time being and started to work on this one.

A short answer to the question of my feelings about masculinity is that they are complicated and deeply ambivalent.

Complicated

Partly my feelings about this topic are complicated because that's just how feelings are -- their shape and landscape don't (and shouldn't) necessarily follow the same contours as analysis. In particular, I mean their tendency to seep from their point of origin, to transpose themselves across similarity or resonance or homology such that the path to get there makes a certain sort of sense but the attachment of the feeling to the new object may not be obvious to those who have not shared the same journey. For instance, we first hear a piece of music during a moment of great personal joy and forever after it makes us feel happy, or we have a terrible break-up and for the next two years any sort of stress -- job stress, family stress, whatever -- triggers sadness about our lost lover. Why this is relevant will become clear below.

Partly my feelings about this topic are complicated because masculinity is complicated, as is gender more generally. Masculinity and gender as a whole can feel simple to some of us, but once we start to pay attention to them, they really aren't.

I understand gender to be about how we move through the world. It is not a classification of inert physical bodies, but rather is socially produced -- that is, gender is an experience created as we interact with those around us. Those activities -- ours and other people's -- do not happen in a formless vacuum but are socially organized and regulated in specific ways. Partly they are regulated by the behaviours of the people we interact with. Partly they are organized by written texts that we take up and act on, and regulated by the ways in which other people take up and act on written texts. Partly they are organized by more amorphous forms of discourse in the broader culture that we take up and act on, and regulated by the ways in which such discourse is taken up and acted upon by other people. Through these ways, through all of our actions every day, gender as a form of social relation is organized and created.

As I wrote a year ago:

Though there is lots of specificity according to social and geographical location, the dominant social organization of gender in North America involves two clusters of bodies, practices, and symbols. One (masculinity) is organized into relative privilege and the other (femininity) into relative oppression, in ways that are interconnected with and articulated through all other social relations. Deviation from the "normal" way of clustering bodies, practices, and symbols is also punished. The ways that gender gets done in the everyday lives of most people results in people getting trained as they grow up to enact in turn socially regulatory practices on the people around them, to enforce both m-over-f and adherence to the binary, though there are lots of other, more specific ways to understand how these relations are reproduced, including social organization mediated through official texts (e.g. immigration regulations, the organization of employment, etc.). Note that the ways in which those trained into dominant masculinities engage in practices that not only oppress women and gender non-conforming people, but are also part of how subordinate masculinities are kept subordinate. As well, none of us completely conform to the binary -- we have practices, preferences, desires, inclinations, tendencies that deviate a little or a lot from the enforced gendered "normal" -- and active social regulation (and, indeed, production) of people's practices, preferences, desires, inclinations, and tendencies is required to keep the supposedly innate binary from falling apart. Obviously, there is several library's worth of detail to how it all plays out in different situations.

Masculinity is the body-symbol-practice cluster. Masculinity is the doing (and the textual and discursive organization of the doing) that constantly recreates the cluster. Masculinity is a way of moving through the world by individuals that draws elements from that cluster and/or that is regulated based on the content of that cluster.

As I've written before in a slightly different context, there are elements of the body-symbol-practice cluster of dominant masculinity, and of individual ways of doing masculinity, that are innocuous, that don't matter. You like pro football and drinking a cold one and using power tools? Whatever, I like the middle one and have no interest in the first or last, but if you like 'em, good for you.

Some aspects of the cluster can be positive, though even with these things it is all about our relations with others -- for example, the imperative to exercise material care for others that is prominent in some ways of doing masculinity can be a great thing. It can be part of equal, intersubjective, mutual relationships with family, friends, partners, children. However, it can also be disempowering, controlling, and downright misogynist, depending on how and in what context it is enacted.

In both of these cases, various practices may be innocuous or (potentially) positive in and of themselves, but all the ways in which we treat them as "boy things" are still a problem and still do harm -- the assumption that people who don't do masculinity can't/don't/shouldn't do them and those who do masculinity can/do/should erases lots of people's realities; the social regulation, the everyday social punishment, when we relate to them in a way that is contrary to gendered expectations, can be heavy and painful burden; and the ways in which the actual doing of many practices occurs in gendered ways is a product of the social relations that produce the two hierarchically arranged body-symbol-practice clusters of dominant gender relations, even if that actual specific practice and its distribution doesn't matter very much. That is, saying that some elements of the cluster are unimportant or positive does not make the existence of enforced clusters any less oppressive, in the m-over-f sense or in the mandatory binary sense. The clustering itself is harmful to people.

And, of course, there are specific elements of the body-symbol-practice cluster of masculinity that are inherently a problem, that are inherently about exerting power-over and doing harm. Like, say, rape. Or taking what other men say more seriously than what women say in interpersonal interactions. Or allowing your inertia and passive-aggressiveness and learned helplessness to keep your female partner doing far more than her share of the housework. Or lots of others. A few men do some of these, a lot of men do others, and saying all of this is definitely not claiming that "all men do X." But each of these oppressive practices is in part produced by (and reproduces) the body-symbol-practice cluster that is masculinity, and none of us who do masculinity can claim that the logics and processes that produce them are nothing to do with us, even if we don't ourselves do that specific thing.

Masculinity, therefore, is complex and heterogeneous. Any particular enactment of masculinity might be very different from another enactment, both in the sense of one person doing masculinity differently from another person but also from one moment of masculinity-as-practice differing from another moment even when it is the same person doing them. That's one level of the complexity. It is made even trickier by the fact that all of these very different experiences of masculinity are connected in material ways --that is, the relations which socially produce them are woven together.

So it makes sense for our feelings about masculinity to be complicated, since masculinity itself is complicated. After all, masculinity is not one kind of practice but many different practices and all of the experiences that those practices can create. There is no timeless essence, but rather a contingent, socially produced clustering of disparate elements that shifts with time and place. Yet that clustering has material reality, because it is reflected (in diverse ways) in the practices of lots of people. Just because there is no inherent, natural, or inevitable connection among the elements that are clustered under the banner "masculinity" doesn't stop our regular experience of that clustering in the behaviour of other people from having an effect on our own consciousness. And the tendency of feelings to transpose themselves in non-linear, unpredictable ways adds a further layer of complication.

Ambivalent

I should start off by saying that the deep ambivalence I feel about masculinity is not the sort of ambivalence that would ever result in me adopting a way of moving through the world that would cease to be read as masculinity by the overwhelming majority of observers. I am cis, not trans. My way of doing masculinity may be quirky and against-the-norm in some moments (though in other moments it is entirely consistent with dominant ways of doing masculinity), and I may see the deliberate adoption of ways of moving through the world that challenge dominant ways of doing masculinity as an important political strategy for bioboys with critical gender politics to adopt. But however strong my negative feelings about the stream of doing, the cluster of bodies and symbols and practices, that get labelled "masculinity," it is and will remain the sea in which I swim.

Yet I have a lot of negative feelings about masculinity, for quite a wide range of reasons.

I have been hurt and damaged by the social regulation that organizes the clustering of practices we call masculinity, and that patrols its borders. All of us who do masculinity have felt that. Even Erving Goffman's "unblushing male" -- that is, a doer of high-status masculinity that meets the requirements for what a man 'should be' -- has moments of not fitting, moments of feeling the need to exhibit emotion that men are told we shouldn't, moments of not being tough enough, hard enough, angry enough, dominant enough. It happens to all of us, even if we want to fit, even if we don't have the tools to articulate that the social punishment we receive for not fitting is a source of pain and is wrong, even if we are among the most enthusiastic at doling out punishment to other men when they deviate from dominant norms of masculinity. From the moment of pain in the hockey locker room when peers deride you as not being man enough, to the long-term stunting of connection with your own emotions brought on by relentless policing of emotional expression by others and by self from a very young age, the regulation that creates masculinity is a source of pain and damage for those of us who do masculinity. This informs my feelings about masculinity.

I have also been hurt by specific practices or tendencies or actions that are part of the masculinity cluster that are not directly about pushing for conformity with dominant ways of doing masculinity. In some contexts, men do masculinity in ways that involve aggression towards others, or involve treating those seen as subordinate in hurtful or disrespectful ways. Such behaviour isn't unique to men, and can be associated in different ways with different kinds of privilege. But it is a common element of body-practice-symbol cluster of masculinity, and is part of how many men do masculinity. Again, all of us have been on the receiving end of this in one form or another, and all of us have been hurt by it. As a relatively privileged man, this has impacted me less than many other people, but it has impacted me. So this, too, informs my feelings about masculinity.

Moreover, people I care about have been hurt both by the punishing regulation that patrols the doing of masculinity and by the various common practices of masculinity that are acts of domination of men over women, straight men over queers of various genders, gender-conforming men over gender non-conforming men, higher-status men over lower-status men. People I care about have been bashed, raped, assaulted, emotionally abused, disrespected, dehumanized, talked over, erased, mocked, harassed, and otherwise treated unjustly where those actions have been organized and enacted, in whole or in part, through masculinity. As above, I'm not claiming that all men do these things or that only men do these things; rather, I'm claiming that these things are often socially produced in ways that are grounded in masculinity. And this plays a huge role in shaping my feelings about masculinity.

I have also done things that I regret, and some things that I am ashamed of, that are related to my training into masculinity. I mean, I've never done the worst things that can be produced in part through training in masculinity, but I've done all of those everyday things that most of us who learn masculinity from infancy do from time to time, from making sexist assumptions, to talking down to a woman or a supposedly lower status man, to falling into looking at some random woman's body in an intrusive, objectifying way. I think I engage in everyday oppressive behaviours rooted in my training in masculinity less often than I did when I was younger, and I hope I'm more open to being called on them, but I still sometimes do them. And I find that upsetting, and my emotional relationship with masculinity is certainly informed by those feelings.

So it is no wonder that there is a sizeable dose of negativity in my mix of feelings about masculinity.

Feeling It

So. I encounter some action, some practice, some utterance, some media product that I know flows from or is related to the body-symbol-practice cluster that is masculinity.

Most of the time when that happens, I don't actually have a noticeable emotional response. None of us could, I don't think, given how pervasively gendered our experiences are. We can't notice everything, we can't always dissect out the impact of gender (especially on the fly), and we can't really react to everything that we notice.

One consequence of that is that there are probably lots of little things that really do matter, in the sense of enacting troubling or oppressive aspects of masculinity, that I don't see or don't react to, both in my own actions and in those of other people around me. If you really pay attention, troubling gender stuff (most of which is related to masculinity in one way or another) is really, really common in our everyday experiences.

It's not just a matter of how the volume of things there you could react to, though. Those of us for whom being on the receiving end is relatively rare and mild and for whom gender privilege is an everyday reality, there is little incentive to notice and lots not to notice, and less reason to have an emotional response when we do notice. Seeing and feeling are heavily influenced by privilege, and it takes ongoing work to counter that. I see more than I used to, but I know I don't see everything.

On the other hand, enactments of masculinity that I do notice and that have sufficient emotional content for me to have an emotional response are more likely to be things which are oppressive and therefore things which evoke negative emotions in me. This is true in the moment, and it is also true of more sustained emotion about particular patterns and tendencies that show up in the doing of masculinity. As well, because of the tendency of emotions to transpose in ways that do make sense but not necessarily the same sense as, say, an assessment of what causes harm and what doesn't, there are instances where I have negative emotional responses to elements of the masculinity cluster that don't really deserve it.

One interesting impact of this emotional ambivalence about masculinity is that, in my case at least, it has reinforced in my own doing of masculinity a particular element of the cluster that is very common and that is not at all a good thing. That is, I find it harder to cultivate substantial connection with other people who do masculinity, particularly bioboys who have no interest in critical gender politics, and I am, quite frankly, less inclined to try. And this is on top of being quite shy and reserved to start with. So almost all of the small number of men with whom I feel some important-to-me connection do masculinity in some (though never all) ways that run counter to dominant norms, and many are political radicals, queers, trans, or some combination. It's not that I don't know that it is politically important for men to cultivate substantive connection with a much broader spectrum of people who do masculinity -- any collective critical gender politics has to involve men connecting with each other, challenging each other, and supporting each other as we act in and support struggles against gender oppression. But...well, I'm working on it.

The Positive

Sometimes, though, I encounter some action, some choice, some practice that is clearly part of another person's way of doing masculinity, and I feel inspired, challenged, enlightened. It doesn't happen often, mind you, and as with the negative, most of the moments that theoretically might evoke such a response do not, in fact, do so.

For instance, above I mentioned the fact that there are practices that are part of dominant conceptions of masculinity and that are, in and of themselves, innocuous or (potentially) positive. Encountering those kinds of practices rarely makes me feel much one way or the other.

There are also the countless little moments of refusal that I know are part of the everyday lives of all of us who do masculinity. It's my understanding that all of us exist in the context of oppressive social relations in a way that is within, against, and beyond them. In the case of social relations of gender for those of us who do masculinity, we all have moments where we refuse to "act like a man" or at least "like a real man is supposed to," where we instinctively feel the ways in which our possibility or the possibility of a loved one is limited if we go along so we just don't. Even the biggest multiply-privileged patriarchal jerk has tiny moments of everyday refusal like that. Often we don't recognize them in ourselves or in those around us, partly because they are often small enough that they are hard to see but also because part of our gender training is, I think, not to see such moments of resistance. These moments are crucial, and part of cultivating critical gender politics among people who do masculinity is to connect with those moments, nurture them in each other, help them grow and become explicit and collective. Nonetheless, largely because of how hard it is to see them, this kind of moment is rarely a source of positive feeling for me.

No, the actions, the choices, the practices that give me positive feelings of various sorts are usually those that are more overtly, and often but not necessarily more consciously, counter to dominant norms of masculinity. It can be as simple as seeing a dad parenting in a tender, nurturing way, especially if I detect some kind of explicitly pro-feminist edge to it. Or it might be witnessing a moment of genuine, tender emotional connection between men, especially between straight men. Or it can be like a moment I remember from an Ivan Coyote story in which the viewpoint character and a friend, both women, overhear without being observed a working-class father passing values of genuine respect for women on to his adult son. Or lots of the subversive, delightful choices of people I know who are somewhere on the transmasculine spectrum. Or lots of other ways in which men visibly, deliberately don't do what they are supposed to do -- the visible and non-utilitarian enjoyment of some "not a guy thing" thing, the unexpected refusal to just accept a sexist comment from a fellow man, all that kind of stuff.

That is, my reactions to masculinity are at their most positive when it is masculinity that is being done in ways that -- intended or not -- act to directly subvert m-over-f and the mandatory binary, to oppose the ways in which those those relations and the practices which produce them harm so, so many people.

Which sounds cheesy and maybe even made up -- like maybe feelings invented in the service of performing a particular politics. Which it isn't. In saying it, I'm not claiming any particular success in doing the kinds of things that give me positive feelings, or at least not nearly enough, and I'm certainly not claiming that I never do masculinity in all those ways that are the basis for my ambivalence about it. By the very complex, heterogenous, socially produced way in which masculinity is enacted by those of us who do it, we are all a mix. And as I said, overcoming the ways in which my own reaction to that mix often prevents me from forming productive connections with others who do masculinity is part of my journey. But even so, it is the kind of counter-normative moment I've just described that gives me hope, gives me positive feeling, when it comes to masculinity.

Video: Break Free of the "Man Box"

Internationally recognized educator and activist in the struggle to end violence against women Tony Porter gives a brief, powerful talk to the TEDWomen conference about masculinity and about the importance of breaking free of what he calls the "man box." Watch it:



(Link found via all of SK, CF, and HW.)

The Social Character of Intellectual Work

I've been gradually working my way through writing a series of posts reflecting on doing intellectual work outside of the academy. I started out with an introduction explaining more or less what the series will involve and why I'm writing them. I followed up with one talking about what exactly I mean by intellectual work and what aspects of it I feel capable of talking about -- that is, that intellectual work is any activity that involves making sense of the world, and that I specifically am going to talk about intellectual work that is done with a sense of vocation and with an intent to communicate whatever sense is made of the world to others in a mediated way. (See the post for a more complete explanation of what I mean by that, as these specifications are central to what I talk about in the rest of the post.)

This time, I'm going to talk about what it means to think about intellectual work in a social way. I raised this in my introductory post in the context of a shift in how I thought about my own most-frequent form of intellectual work, writing. That is, when I first started the painful journey that allowed me to identify unflinchingly as a writer, my main focus of attention was on the relationship between myself and the page. However, making good choices requires having as complete a picture as possible of what is going on. It has become clear to me that what I do as a writer -- or what anyone does who engages in vocational, mediated intellectual work, whatever the form of what they produce -- can only really be understood in a grounded, material way if I recognize that the relationship between the producer and the immediate content they produce is only one part of the picture. An important part, for those of us who labour daily to shape blood and sweat into meaning meant to be shared with others, but just a part. Intellectual work is also integrated into social relations in a general sense, much like any other activity. And in a more specific way, it is centrally about creating a particular kind of relation between the person doing the intellectual work and those who read (view, hear) whatever it is that they produce.

All Doing is Social

In thinking about this, I start from the idea that all doing is social, though the way it is all organized in our present society breaks that sociality (though still always depends on it) and makes it hard for us to see. I like the way that John Holloway talks about it (see my reviews of two of his books), but his is just one take on an idea explicitly present in a number of left traditions and latently present in many others. He writes:

Doing is inherently social. What I do is always part of a social flow of doing, in which the precondition of my doing is the doing (or having-done) of others, in which the doing of others provides the means of my doing. Doing is inherently plural, collective, choral, communal. This does not mean that all doing is (or indeed should be) undertaken collectively. It means rather that it is is difficult to conceive of a doing that does not have the doing of others as a pre-condition. I sit at the computer and write this, apparently a lonely individual act, but my writing is part of a social process, a plaiting of my writing with the writing of others (those mentioned in the footnotes and a million others), and also with the doing of thsoe who designed the computer, assembled it, packed it, transported it, those who installed the electricity in the house, those who generated the electricity, those who produced the food that gives me the energy to write, and so on, and so on. There is a community of doing, a collective of doers, a flow of doing through time and space... Any act, however individual it seems, is part of a chorus of doing in which all humanity is the choir (albeit an anarchic and discordant choir). Our doings are so intertwined that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins. [Change the World Without Taking Power, p. 26]

He goes on to talk about how the way that our lives and the relationships amongst us are organized in a capitalist context means that the social character of our doing is fragmented and hidden. This is true in material ways related to a few people having great power over the making and doing of most of the rest of us, and to the capitalist tendency to focus material organization and symbolic attention on relations among things rather than on people and our activities. However, he writes, "The rupture of doing does not mean that doing ceases to be social, simply that it becomes indirectly social" [ibid, p. 31].

As the quoted paragraph implies, there are at least a couple of general ways in which the social character of all doing is relevant to talking about intellectual work in the ways that I want to.

The first is that the overall context in which the intellectual work that I'm talking about occurs is a capitalist one. A future post in the series will talk a bit about the practicalities of finding space in our lives to engage in intellectual work outside of the academy, but however we choose to relate to it, capitalism sets the ground upon which we must make decisions. That is, as many thinkers have noted in different ways, capitalism depends on compulsion, on unfreedom. We are compelled by the way social relations are organized to engage with the market. This means that in order not to die, almost all of us must sell our time and effort for money, exist in a relation of personal dependence on someone else who does so, or exist in a relation of personal dependence on state relations (which, particularly under neoliberalism, are organized to push us as soon as possible into waged labour regardless of the level of the wage or the working conditions). All of our choices about what we do with our time exist in and are constrained by this larger social context, and intellectual work is no exception.

The second broad way in which intellectual work is integrated into the social world is through discourse. That is, the sort of vocational, mediated intellectual work I'm writing about can only occur through engaging with the words, organizations-of-language, and shapes-of-thought that are already out there, that have been shaped by others. The need to be intelligible to people who have taken up what has come before shapes the space we have to make sense of the world and to communicate that sense to others. Note that I'm not attributing some sort of external reality to discourse, independent of the people take it up and propagate it, but that doesn't make those constraints any less powerful. To repeat a quote from Mikhail Bakhtin I originally posted almost five years ago:

The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that a speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.

And, similarly, the contribution of our own intention, our own accent, is part of what others must deal with when they take up our words to make meaning of their own, and when they deploy them in turn.

The final general way in which intellectual work is social is mentioned above by Holloway and is closely enough related to discourse that some might collapse the two, but I think they are worth keeping separate. That is, there are the more overt ways that we draw on the ideas of people who have come before (whether we are always able to recognize that debt or not). To adapt Holloway's words, we plait our writing (and the other ways we have of engaging in intellectual work) with the writing (and other intellectual work) of others.

An Artifact and its Circulation

There is something more specific about the social character of the kind of intellectual work I'm writing about, however. As I've said, I'm writing about intellectual work that is intended to be communicated to others, and that said communication is intended to happen in a mediated way.

Let me put it another way. Intellectual work of this sort is meant to connect with other people using some kind of media artifact that encodes whatever sense I've made of the world that I want to share. This artifact might be a video clip, a snippet of broadcast audio, a book, a blog post, a 'zine, a newspaper article, an academic journal article, or something else entirely. I make it, it goes out into the world, and someone takes it up and makes their own sense through engaging with it. In a very particular way, this is creating a relation between me and whoever is at the other end of that process. Admittedly, to speak of what is happening as a connection, as a relation between two people, may feel a bit peculiar. It's a relation that is usually one way, and even in the era of comments sections and easily obtained email addresses for feedback it is still pretty imbalanced. It is often very impersonal, since person B is completely unknown to person A, and person A is most often known to B only as a disembodied name or perhaps through a shallow public persona. It is asynchronous -- you write it, it sits as an object, and at some later point someone else reads it. And it is usually quite fleeting. But it is still a connection, and it can be a crucial one, depending on how the person at the other end takes up the sense that you have made of the world and encapsulated into the artifact that has then been circulated. This kind of textually mediated relation can inspire us, organize our thoughts, shape our actions, make us feel. (It's long enough ago that I read it that I can't remember which bits, but some of the way of understanding texts in this paragraph comes from here, and see also this engagement with a later book by the same author.)

Creating that relation, then, requires three steps that go beyond the tortured relation between writer (or other intellectual worker) and page. It requires taking the sense that we have made of the world and that we wish to share and creating an artifact out of it -- a circulable artifact. Then it requires some means to actually circulate said artifact. And, finally, it requires people at the other end to engage with the content, to do a certain kind of work themselves that involves creating their own meaning from whatever it is that you've written, filmed, recorded, blogged, tweeted, printed, or photocopied.

This is not separate from the me-and-the-page relation, or an add-on, or an option; it is right at the heart of what (vocational, mediated) intellectual work is. Making good decisions about how to engage in (vocational, mediated) intellectual work requires treating it as such.

For one thing, I would argue that what I've actually done when I engage in an act of intellectual work is inseparable from how these relations get formed. What is the artifact? Where does it circulate? Who engages with it and how? The same thousand words handed out as a photocopy on a downtown Sudbury street corner, published on my blog, published in my local newspaper, or published in the New York Times are, materially, doing different things, and I think it makes sense to be able to talk about my act of making sense of the world as transmitted in those thousand words with all of the nooks and crannies and ebbs and flows of reach and impact as integral to that conversation. And it is important to emphasize that this is far, far more than making judgments about how many people the work reaches. It is about what you are trying to achieve with a given piece of intellectual work. If those thousand words are on my blog, for instance, odds are that relatively few of the people with whom they connect would live close to me, while handing out photocopies on a streetcorner and publishing in a local paper would both achieve that, whereas the population likely to access it on this site is more likely to represent a particular constellation of intellectual and political proclivities but a geographic dispersal. And even within Sudbury, handing it out on a downtown streetcorner and publishing in, say, The Sudbury Star, are going to reach different audiences. And sometimes reaching a small, specific audience is exactly what you want. As bell hooks said years ago in an interview,

I would never feel happy just to have that limited readership; at the same time, it's also okay when people want to write something that may only be magic for a small audience. I don't want to denigrate that. I think we can have both.

That begins to get at the ways in which it's not just about assessing the reach and impact but also about making the nitty-gritty decisions about what we are doing in the me-and-the-page stage of intellectual work.

Let me try to explain that a bit better. I think the place to start is the fact that most people encounter the media artifacts that they read (view, hear) not in random places but as a result of largely habitual practices. The practices have developed in connection with the different ways that media artifacts already get produced. That is, most people have a routine when it comes to reading newspapers or blogs, watching the eleven o'clock news or online video documentaries. We listen to the CBC or Democracy Now!. We read these periodicals or those books, go to hear certain speakers, take classes, read academic journals, listen to particular hip-hop artists, and so on. Our practices for taking in information about the world do change, but not quickly or easily.

As I said, these habits come to exist in connection with the various paths which already exist whereby media artifacts come to exist. And media artifacts come to exist through the work of people organized into particular kinds of organizations, institutions, or more ephemeral spaces -- clusters of relations and practices, if you will. These clusters, in turn, are embedded in broader social relations. Those clusters of relations that produce and circulate artifacts can and do change, entirely new configurations do occasionally spring into existence, and existing configurations can be pushed to adopt new standards and practices in some circumstances. But the opportunities for them to exist and survive are very dependent on the larger context in which they exist. Each of those existing paths has constraints. A newspaper, a book publisher, a magazine, a community radio station, network TV, your friend's older brother's 'zine, a community group's web site, some funky journal that experiments with form and content -- each of these is produced by groups of people who make choices about what to turn into artifacts for circulation. Each has its own particular constellation of constraints. Some need to make a profit, and most can't consistently lose large amounts of money. Some are subject to disciplinary practices and norms, others to professional practices and norms, all of which are regulated by particular institutions. Actual audience responses and (often quite poorly informed and prejudiced) assumptions about likely audience responses are also constraints. Some are more directly subject to regulation by state relations. Some are owned by larger private corporations which have interests that they are compelled to protect. All of these things add up to each source of media artifacts having a specific range of forms which they are interested in, and a specific range of content. As well, each has an existing public who habitually relate to them and which they are likely to be able to reach with each new artifact they produce.

There are also more do-it-yourself alternatives, like blogs or 'zines, which have fewer barriers to turning whatever you want into a media artifact, but they come with their own set of challenges and constraints around the circulation step. And in every case, the existing tastes (prejudices, preferences, practices) in people you might connect with around form, content, medium, and so on plays a role in whether (and how) they will take up the meaning you have made even if you manage to draw the artifact to their attention.

All of these constraints, the details of which look very different in different situations, are not extraneous to our processes of making that meaning and inscribing it on artifacts. I've already said that the character and extent of what is actually done in the name of (vocational, mediated) intellectual work depends not just on me and my blank page but on where and how and with who these mediated relations with other people happen. How you navigate the significantly constrained landscape in which these mediated relations can be made to happen depends partly on what you want to achieve, what you want to create, but in order to do that it is often necessary to keep those constraints and possibilities in mind even during the me-and-the-page phase. If I want to do some intellectual work based on protests against a neoliberal trade summit (or based on a 19th century English novel, or based on the learning processes of midwifery students, or whatever), how I do that work depends on how I decide to try and navigate the landscape of possibility and constraint that lies between me-and-the-page and the people I want to forge this sort of mediated relation with. Who I want to reach, what I want them to get out of it, how I want them to engage in it, what clusters of artifact producing relations I already have access to -- these and many other questions about what I want to accomplish shape whether I write or film, whether I use broadly accessible or narrowly specialized language, whether I write something small or long, what form I use, what voice I use, what style I use.

The sense that I feel called to make, the words that are burning inside of me and need to come out, that very personal struggle embodied by the relation between me and the page, are crucially important and present. But they are not separate from the requirements of the very social process of building strange, fleeting, asynchronous relations with people I may never meet. Intellectual work is social in character, and we will understand our work better if we keep that in mind.

Review: Forbidden Narratives

[Kathryn Church. Forbidden Narratives: Critical Autobiography as Social Science. New York: Routledge, 1995.]

Earlier this year, I finished the manuscript for my book on Canadian history-from-below. This means that now, in contrast to a rather lengthy preceding period, the majority of my reading no longer revolves around that particular piece of writing. However, one of the first friends and allies to read the entire manuscript made a few suggestions about useful sources to add to the mix. I'm resolutely not working on the manuscript right now, and won't be until I have a go-ahead from a publisher, but I have obtained a few of those sources. This is the first, and it is relevant to my chapter on anti-psychiatry organizing in Toronto in the '70s and '80s.

The author had been a practicing psychologist in Saskatchewan, and after moving to Toronto in 1983 began to work as a contract researcher doing things around "consumer participation" for the Canadian Mental Health Association. In 1989, she left that work and began a PhD in sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education as a way to reflect on her work with consumer/survivors of mental health services. A combination of alliance with and confrontation from some key consumer/survivor activists pushed her to wrestle much more thoroughly with the experiences and standpoint with respect to consumer/survivors. Ultimately, this work contributed to Church experiencing a breakdown herself, which in turn informs her analysis in this book. The central piece of research she presents is around the process and impacts of a major consultation with consumer/survivors by the Ontario provincial government in the early '90s, and she embeds it in a powerful and effective way in the narrative of her own journey with theory, with her own health, and with her personal and political orientation to self-organization among consumer/survivors.

The book is certainly relevant to my chapter on anti-psychiatry. It happens a little later and is grounded in a somewhat different political stream of consumer/survivor organizing than Don Weitz, the interview participant whose story serves as the centre of my chpater, but it is definitely a valuable source for me to be familiar with. As well, a couple of the key figures who loom large in Church's experiences with consumer/survivors were also important names in my research -- Pat Capponi and David Reville (who has a piece in this book).

However, I'm glad that my friend recommended that I track this book down for many reasons beyond its direct relevance to that particular piece of work. Church's text documents her own struggles and very grounded reflections on numerous issues that are central ongoing concerns for me.

For instance, she is quite concerned with thinking through issues of knowledge production. I don't always manage to do these things, but her emphasis on experience is one I think is important -- she both emphasizes the importance of being transparent and reflexive about her own experience in relation to any piece of research or writing, and also argues that it is best to begin research not from theory or a model or speculation but from actual material practices. I also really like her decision to document her own processes of "coming into theory," of engaging with significant new ways of thinking about the world, herself, and her research as both intellectual processes and processes of personal transformation. I like, and share, her tendency to relate to theory in an ad hoc, shifting, pieced together, adaptation-focused way, and her section heading "Breaking Theoretical 'Monogamies'" delights me.

I also like her experimentation with different forms of text. Though I suspect this book was adapted from her dissertation, it doesn't read like a dissertation. I really liked the way that her inclusion of excerpts from her personal journal, extensive blocks of transcribed interview material, and imagined dialogue between different aspects of self not only served to make different voices and change over time more transparently visible in the text, but also made it all more readable.

As well, she is centrally concerned in a practical, personal way about questions of engaging in struggle and engaging in research/writing from a position of relative privilege. The particular specific privilege she is talking about is her position as a mental health professional and then as an academic, and certainly some of her questions resonated with my own experiences doing community-based research on homelessness in a social service agency as well as with more general questions about how to be a responsible and effective ally in a variety of areas. Of course, her perspective on these questions has a rare and interesting dimension, which is the evolution of her own personal standpoint because of her breakdown and its aftermath.

Her engagement with some of the emotional dimensions of organizing and researching/writing from a position of privilege are some of the most powerful and useful parts of the book. It initially comes up in her account of her decision to do graduate work centred around consumer/survivor struggles. She got in touch with Pat Capponi, who, as they gradually built a relationship of friendship and political alliance, consistently challenged her around her emotional capacity to do the work -- to actually relate to consumer/survivors entirely as human beings, rather than engage in the kind of self-protective emotional withdrawal, dismissal, and blanking that are standard, often invisible-to-self practices both of many professionals who deal with consumer/survivors (and, let's face it, also of many professionals who deal with people living in poverty and racialized people) and often people socialized into the white middle class more broadly. She also talks about how (middle-class) professionals, in the context of the large-scale consultation that was her main object of research, reacted to the presence and participation of (not always but often poor or working-class) consumer/survivors. She talks about how ostensibly neutral standards for how consultations should be carried out -- standards based in professional discourse and practice and comfort -- served to silence consumer/survivors or to allow professionals to construct their participation as attacks or worthy of dismissal. She also talks about the lack of space for professionals to engage with their own experience of the consultations, and how the emotional containment and repression that requires is a likely contributor to limiting the impact that consumer/survivors could have on the process -- the extent to which the "unsettling relation" that is their participation can unsettle things in systemic and lasting ways. Certainly questions of how to respond to anger (my own and other people's), of deep training in silence, in editing out the personal in public/activist contexts, are all things I wrestle with myself.

And I really identified with her admission that even after all of this, even after long years of relationship building, even after being trusted to take on the role she played by many consumer/survivors, even after her own breakdown, she still finds that without sustained contact with spaces constituted by consumer/survivors, her hold on essential elements of the consumer/survivor standpoint fades easily in the context of her own relatively privileged everyday life. I think that part of the political work for those of us with privilege of various sorts is to build in ourselves responsiveness to the world grounded in a critical awareness of the relations which privilege us, something that our everyday experience of those relations actively discourages. Living in the context of whole, mutual, non-utilitarian relationships with folks who experience the more oppressive aspects of those relations can help to ground us, to give that responsiveness some stability, but it is only and always partial and it can dissolve so, so quickly.

Anyway, this book is not easy to get your hands on, but it is worth reading for lots of reasons, from its critical analysis of the relationship between consumer/survivors and mental health services to its grounded, thoughtful take on knowledge production, social change, privilege, and emotion.

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