Quote: Writing Self

Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race ... everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze. This I know, and yet the question remains: where to start? Maybe with my white skin, stubbly red hair, left ear pierced, shoulders set slightly off center, left riding higher than right, hands tremoring, traced with veins, legs well-muscled. Or with me in the mirror, dressing to go out, knotting my tie, slipping into my blazer, curve of hip and breast vanishing beneath my clothes. Or possibly with the memory of how my body felt swimming in the river, chinook fingerlings nibbling at my toes. There are a million ways to start, but how do I reach beneath the skin?

-- Eli Clare (Exile & Pride p. 143)

Sudbury's 99%: Day 1

My first journalistic piece in awhile -- written for and published at the site of the Grassroots Sudbury Media working group affiliated with The Media Co-op.

Sudbury's 99%: Day 1

On a sunny but cool October 22, the global wave of "Occupy" actions swept into Sudbury, Ontario. Around 40 people gathered in Memorial Park in the city's downtown and began conversations that they hope are an early step in changing their community and changing the world.

Christy Knockleby, who identified herself as a stay-at-home mother, said, "There are probably a lot of peple in Sudbury who think that change needs to happen but don't know what to do." She sees the kinds of spaces being created by Occupy actions as a chance to "make contact with other people" and begin to figure that out. She brought a bulletin board to the park in hopes that people can bring information about the struggles that they are involved in or are passionate about, pin it to the board, and read the information that other people have left.

Local climate change activist Cathy Orlando agreed: "I see this Occupy movement as something that is connecting everything together." She continued, "I may be a climate activist but I care about poverty, I care about world peace," and bringing people together in this way is a recognition that all of these issues are linked.

As in many other cities, a key element of the afternoon's activities was a general assembly meeting to begin making decisions about how the action would move forward. Though at times chaotic and unfocused, the meeting made initial steps to address basic questions like how the group intends to make decisions, how to relate to the police, and how to break into smaller committees or discussion circles to deal with specific questions and various practical tasks.

An important concern during the assembly was the name of the action. While many spoke in favour of retaining "Occupy Sudbury," others drew attention to the objections that some indigenous people have raised to that language. These objections relate to their experience of having lived under occupation in North America for five centuries, and to the ways that this use of language has in some instances been emblematic of a broader disconnection from the concerns and struggles of indigenous people and people of colour. Suggestions for new names included "The People's Assembly of Sudbury" and "Sudbury's 99%", while still retaining something like "formerly Occupy Sudbury" in online material to make the group easier to find.

Marguerite Thibaudeau, a student at Laurentian University and a Metis woman, brought word that the chief of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbeck First Nation, in whose traditional territory Sudbury lies, had extended his welcome to the action. Though she acknowledged that there have been moments of poor choices by non-Native activists at other Occupy actions in terms of relating to indigenous issues and peoples, including at the one in Toronto where she spent last weekend, she feels it is personally important for her to be present and to participate: "Every issue that these people talk about [at Occupy actions] we've been talking about for 500 years."

The importance of "acknowledging the colonial context in which we are operating" was also echoed by Chris Dixon, a long-time activist currently based in Sudbury. He has been to Occupy actions in New York City, Seattle, and Vancouver over the past month and he spoke to the general assembly in Sudbury about some of the lessons he has taken from what he has seen. He suggested, for instance, that Occupy actions at their best avoid a purely internal focus and need to "constantly be relating to other sectors and other groups who would be in broad sympathy with what we're doing."

As well, he thinks it is a priority to build "a clear and intentional decision-making process" and to draw on the lessons that social movements have learned over the last several decades about different models, beyond just general assemblies, to be participatory and democratic. And he emphasized the importance of pedagogy: Occupy actions are "succeeding where they are trying to transform a public space to a space of learning and exchange. ... When we occupy together we can actually learn together and gain skills we can use over the long haul of what we need to do."

Other participants brought other experiences and concerns to the event. Jonathan Glass is a part-time worker and a recipient of Ontario Disability Support. He wondered, "Why does a banker have to get so much money and the little guy gets nothing?" He went on, "You work 9-to-5 and you get a shitty paycheque."

Jamie West is an active member of the United Steel Workers Local 6500, which represents workers in the nickel mines in the Sudbury area that are owned by international mining giant Vale. He has been following the developments at Occupy Wall Street closely and is really encouraged -- "It seems to be a movement like you'd hear about in the '60s." He said, "It isn't just a bunch of radical people in Toronto" but rather it is lots of "people [who are] not seeing much of a future for their kids."

Speaking about the fellow members of his local, he drew the connection to the year-long strike that they waged against Vale in 2009 and 2010. "I think because of the strike a lot of us are more politically active and politically aware" but for the moment he feels that some activists from the union might be a bit "standoffish" because they "don't want this to be a Steel Workers movement, we want it to be a people's movement that Steel Workers are attending."

When the general assembly ended in Memorial Park, a couple of people broke out guitars, a few continued puzzling out practical details, most stood around and chatted, and the handful planning to camp out started putting up tents. Even a question as basic as bathrooms remained to be solved, and though initial steps to think through relating to the police had begun it was still far from clear how cops on patrol in the middle of the night might respond to tents in the park. Yet the mood was buoyant and there seemed to be a consensus that something siginificant had begun.

Participant Laurel O'Gorman -- a graduate student and trade union activist -- stressed the need for ongoing work to make sure that Occupy actions make decisions in good ways and really listen to all of the voices that need to be heard. At the same time, she said of the continent-wide movement, "It's just so beautiful that it has built from -- what was it, 12 people or 21 people in New York?"

Quote: Masculinity

Masculinity has been and continues to be a normative rubric that has policed the sex/gender system. I see very little advantage in recuperating the term masculinity because, as a category, masculinity has normalized heterosexual and masculinist privilege. Masculinity is, among other things, a cultural imperative to enact a mode of "manliness" that is calibrated to shut down queer possibilities and energies. The social construct of masculinity is experienced by far too many men as a regime of power that labors to invalidate, exclude, and extinguish faggotry, effeminacy, and queerly coated butchness. This is not to discount the possibility that a discourse on masculinity might produce some theoretical traction for scholars working in the field of gender theory. But I do aim to suggest that any such project that fails to factor in and interrogate heteronormativity and masculinist contours of such a discourse reproduces the phobic ideology of masculinity.

-- José Esteban Muñoz (Disidentifications pp. 57-58)

A Question About Naming Ourselves

One of the courses I'm taking right now involves writing a 'thought provoking question' about each week's readings before the class in question. As I've written before on this site, I'm trying to keep my thinking and reading and writing for school as closely linked both to movements and to my future needs as a writer as I can, and one happy consequences of that fact is that my question this week makes a reasonable quickie blog post. So here it is:

Choices about self-naming can be an important element of struggles against oppression. One such choice can be the adoption of a practice of identifying that is grounded in certain shared oppressive experiences but that deliberately broadens previously existing commonsense approaches to identifying as a way of building alliances across difference (or at least the possibility of such alliances) -- for example, "people of colour" in North America, "black" in the '70s and '80s in the U.K., and "queer" in various spaces today. Responsible, liberatory use of such identifications (or, indeed, any identification that is meant to be the basis of struggle) means being able to talk about difference connected to power within those categories. But what might it look like to do that in a way that does not just fall back on recreating exactly the sort of classificatory and regulatory naming schemes that are used in projects of ruling? Is it even possible? How might we go about constructing ways of talking about self, experience, power, and struggle that allow us to name and take responsibility for differences among us, that are accessible and comprehensible, and that still make clear our resistance to regulatory schemes that are implemented in part through constructing categories of difference? Does it even make sense to try and think of that as something we can meaningfully begin in language rather than as something that can only be done through transforming the material practices of the regulatory regimes themselves?

Taking Hope From Right-Wing Ridiculousness

I almost never spend any time reading material from the right-wing blogosphere -- I can appreciate that understanding the discourse of various categories of opponents is worthwhile, and I respect those like thwap who occasionally put energy into argument and rebuttal, but it has just never felt like much of a priority for me. However, for a major piece of work for school I'm looking into various kinds of writing, video, audio, and images produced before, during, and after last year's G20 summit in Toronto. This has lead me to dip my toe into the toxic waters of the online writing by Stephen Harper's grassroots groupies and critics from the right. I haven't got very far yet but I ran across a piece that, among other things, made some general comments about "protest" in the lead-up to the G20, and I thought it might be worth engaging with as the Occupy movement picks up steam. I should say I have no idea who the author is or where she is situated within the murky ecology of Canada's online right, but I find her aggressive disinterest in actual fact posed as the asking of critical questions to be morbidly fascinating.

Here's the link, and here are the paragraphs that interest me:

Hmmm. Well, at least we know the Falun Gong have something to protest about. But what about this one: Some protesters "reportedly recruited...by Chinese officials...". CBC, have you ever thought to explore the "recruited" theme with any of the other protesters - you know, the spoiled middle class brats? Like, what and who is behind these organizations? Does their "message" stand up to scrutiny or is it skewed mightily by an ideology? Do they ever attempt to get their message out through other means - writing letters, visiting politicians to explain their issues? And especially, do the groups protesting have aims more lofty than simply protesting and rabble rousing and if so, what are they, and how do their protests ever help, if at all, to achieve any of those aims?

Let's take the poverty one, for example? Have we seen any direct evidence that would show organized mobbery leads to better funding for groups that work with the poor, never mind more money in the hands of the poor, or more to the point, more poor lifting themselves permanently out of poverty? Do these groups actually make a difference in the lives of the poor or are they only a band-ade on an perennial problem that has always been with us and cannot be fixed, in which case, why do their protests get so much attention from you media types?

Have we seen the CBC or any other media outlet or any of these protest groups ever explore the relationship between "protest culture" behaviour, especially at past heads of state or powerful international institutions' meetings, on the one hand, and the need for massive expenditure on security? Duh!! We know you're not into self examination but don't ya' think there might be a link, CBC?

Come on folks. These protests serve only one purpose, and it's narcissism. The immature little groupies (some of whom may indeed be chronologically challenged, but still intellectually and emotionally immature) who show up to protest simply want to be able to say, "I was there when....and I was sooooo radical chic!"

It is -- to borrow a popular piece of internet phraseology -- full of fail. It's hard to know what is deliberate demagoguery and what is ignorance caused by social and physical distance from the groups in question combined with aggressive disinterest in remedying that ignorance. Generally speaking, the many different organizations involved in protesting the G20 are pretty open about who they are, what they do, and why they do it. The idea of shadowy backers and recruitment in any sense beyond, y'know, talking to people, is pretty giggle-worthy. And while middle-class youth are disproportionately represented in certain segments of an action like the anti-G20 protest, all it takes is standing in the middle of a crowd at such things to see what a high proportion of participants you erase in such a generalization. Similarly, the "narcissism" she asserts to be the primary motivation for protesters in her final paragraph is kind of puzzling to anyone who has ever actually talked to people at a protest -- again, all groups have lots of different people with lots of different motivations, and things like Margaret Wente columns tend to cherrypick less flattering moments and amplify them for bloggers such as this one to pick up on, but it just doesn't hold up to even the most elementary empirical investigation. And, again, the passive-aggressive accusation in the question about whether these groups "ever attempt to get their message out through other means" is more a display of the writer's ignorance of how these groups and those of us who participate in them work than anything else.

What interests me the most, though, are the various assertions about the efficacy of protest, especially around poverty. Motivation is always invisible and inside people, and if you want to imagine shadowy conspiracies rather than looking at what's right in front of you, it is always possible to invent ways to do so. But the connection between organizing against poverty (which is often done by people who are themselves living in poverty, despite what this blogger claims) and gains for poor people can only be avoided by refusing to look. Because the fact is, if you are willing to look for it, there is plenty of evidence that the diverse forms of organizing represented by the tens of thousands who protested the G20 can do something to alleviate poverty. You can see that on a big scale by looking at the impact that the Canadian welfare state had on poverty, if you compare the pre-welfare state years to the years of its height. This was especially true for seniors. Without actions along the lines of the anti-G20 protest, there would've been no Canadian welfare state -- yes, it was more complicated than that, but mobilization by poor people was essential to that victory. And you can see it by looking at examples that are smaller in scale and more recent too. For instance, take two of the key groups that were involved in some aspects of the anti-G20 organizing, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and No One Is Illegal - Toronto. Not everyone who participated was as grounded in communities and in ongoing struggle as those two groups, and I think there is more to say about that, but they are prime examples of the kind of work about which this blogger is being so dismissive. Their actions have many, many positive outcomes. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing them, since results are more or less the point of it all. Not that I've never had questions about choices they've made, and not that everything they do works, but OCAP's direct action casework is an amazing model that directly benefits people living in poverty, and their years of work around the "special dietary supplement" -- including the ways their work opened space for more moderate groups to take advantage of it -- brought many millions of dollars into the hands of poor Ontarians. Similarly, No One Is Illegal has won numerous victories that specifically benefit immigrants and refugees in the Toronto area.

There's one way to look at this blogger's take on protest that might make you want to pull your hair out. The idea of shadowy backers, spoiled narcissists, and the pointlessness of efforts to create change are hardly uncommon, after all, and it can be hard to have to face them again and again. But I think there is also something hopeful about how ridiculous and how open to refutation it all is. I mean, I don't think this blogger is about to be convinced any differently, and I certainly don't believe that learning and growth are a simple product of excavating and publishing "facts." But in the course of struggle, in the course of engagement with ordinary people in all of the different spaces and ways that our movements need to do so, the fact that anti-protest sentiment is so centred on straight-up inaccuracies actually favours our side. And that's hopeful.