Review: Undoing Gender

[Judith Butler. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.]

I don't want to fall into the trap of claiming there is only one proper way to take up university-derived ideas in relation to the struggles of ordinary people, because there are lots. Moreover, I think encouraging experimentation with and proliferation of approaches is important, given that rigid exclusions are likely to end up turned against the people I'm most interested in listening to anyway. So the fact that this work takes up questions at least in part because of their importance to oppressions experienced and resisted by ordinary people deserves a thumbs up, and the fact that it is an academic superstar who is doing it -- well, the fact that it is someone trying to make good use of the space she has carved out through fortune and work in an often anti-woman, anti-queer (though also white-privileging) academy also deserves to be affirmed. Nonetheless, despite the fact that it addresses many questions that I consider interesting and important, I'm still kind of ambivalent about the specifics of how this book goes about it.

I came to this book via a course in the first four months of my year-long digression into graduate school -- I read a couple of the pieces in the collection for that reason and then decided to read the whole thing. My ambivalence about the book is not, I should point out, related to Butler's famously opaque prose. Even in the early book that first made her reputation, Gender Trouble, the writing is not as difficult as it is sometimes made out to be, and not only is this book more obviously oriented towards practical questions than that one, it is also more clearly and just plain better written. It's still definitely an academic book, but it is not a hopelessly obscure one.

As is generally true of books constructed by collecting essays, the ground covered by this one is a quirky reflection of the author's interests, meaning both her scholarly interests and her activist interests. A number of common topics and themes weave into different essays in different ways. Perhaps the recurring theme that I was least compelled by was Butler's commitment to recovering psychoanalytic theory from sexism and heterosexism -- while I quite like the idea of developing practices that are all about super close listening to help people understand themselves, and I do think we need to understand in a more general sense the ways in which people come to be who we are, my encounters (limited but not completely trivial) with psychoanalytic theory have left me unconvinced that it is a particularly useful way to undergird either of those projects, even with the kinds of changes Butler wants to make.

Most of the other stuff, though, seems interesting and important. She returns several times to questions about what it means for people to be admitted or excluded from the category "human" and for lives to be intelligible to the people who encounter them. She connects this to a discussion of socially enforced norms as not just being about discipline and about shaping people in oppressive ways, but also about creating the conditions for intelligibility and, indeed, for thriving. It is clear that these questions relate to her own work around the human rights of queer people in international contexts, and to her efforts to think through how to do that work such that it does not play into the opportunistic concern for queers that has in recent years sometimes been mobilized by Western states for imperial and white supremacist ends.

Another recurring set of questions in this book has to do with a set of interrelated binaries -- things like sexual difference versus gender, queer theory versus feminist theory, the symbollic versus the social. What this boils down to, I think, is relating to approaches that differ fundamentally from her own understanding of gender as iterative social enactment in ways that are not just arguing against them but trying to take a step back and understand more about the origins of such differences. At times the discussion feels pretty abstract, but it is important because it underlies various disagreements among different strands of feminism, between some feminist and some queer politics, and among various ways of understanding kinship (which relates to various struggles for official state recognition of the legitimacy of some kinds of queer relationships).

She also covers some important ground in terms of the ways in which trans and intersex lives are erased, twisted, distorted, and regulated. And the final essay of the book includes some interesting reflections on the state of philosophy, as something that exists both as a clearly defined discipline and as a set of broader practices that get called philosophy but that are regarded by the discipline as clearly Other to itself -- while I didn't necessarily get all the ins and outs with respect to philosophy, it did make me think about the relationship of my own movement history work to disciplinary history.

I'm not sure I completely understand my own reservations about this book. One way to think about at least some of them is the socialist distinction between "from below" and "from above," I think. In saying this, I don't mean to cast aspersions on Butler's activist commitments, her scholarship, or her efforts to relate the two -- as I said, I respect the impulse, and I find much of the resulting writing to be thought provoking and very much relevant to life and struggle. However, I think there is an extent to which Butler's efforts to do academic theory in ways that are responsive to struggles for justice and liberation remains more committed to the intellectual terrain of struggle within the academy than I would want my own work to be. That shapes how she writes, what problems she takes up (even when guided by political priorities), and what she picks out as important in those problems. There is value in this, certainly. Refusing to cede elite terrains of discourse can sometimes appear to be pointless and/or hopelessly compromised, but what happens in such terrains can matter a great deal in shaping people's experiences and the space they have to struggle, and it makes sense for activists who already have high status in such contexts to take up that aspect of struggle. At the same time, I think there is also a need for intellectual work by people who are willing (as needed) to take up writing done in the academy but that have no attachment to producing work that necessarily responds to the expectations and norms for work in the academy, and so is more able to respond to requirements based in lives and movements. So I think work like this book is useful, but it comes nowhere close to exhausting the possible content -- the possible kinds of content -- with which we might fill the category "intellectual work from below."


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Review: Disidentifications

[José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.]

How do we come to be who we are? How can we relate to what we are told that we are or that we must be ... especially when those messages from the words and images and enactments that surround us are not just something we relate to externally but get inside us and shape our imaginations and desires as well? These and related questions lie under the exploration of various cultural artifacts and instances of performance in this book.

The two niches of academic writing into which this text places itself are performance theory and queer of colour theory. The former means that it focuses on analyzing performance and related cultural production. That isn't something I've encountered too much before, so I don't always feel able to evaluate the specifics of how it is done in this book, and I don't know that I always buy all of the ways in which claims get made. The queer of colour theory aspect feels a bit more legible to me, given that my idiosyncratic reading path has taken me through a scattering of queer theory and anti-racism, but it does mean that the book is written in a particular idiom of queertheoryese, which, quite understandably, not everybody is necessarily interested in trying to read. With that proviso, however, I would still argue that there is lots to learn here about acting in the world, even for people whose experiences are organized rather differently than the people at the centre of Muñoz's analysis.

The book's approach begins from the idea that the dominant ideologies which are organized by and in turn organize the social world, as they are taken up and enacted by human beings, call us to understand and enact ourselves in certain ways -- "interpellation" is the way that French marxist Louis Althusser described this process. Another French marxist, this one a linguist called Michel Pêcheux, built on this idea to pose three possible modes of responding to this call. Identification (or assimilation) means embracing what you are called to enact and willingly taking on what the dominant ideology says you are and should be. Counteridentification means explicitly rejecting it, refusing it, denying it, but in so doing -- in understanding self as "not-X" -- you are still in some ways organized by what you refuse, by "X." Disidentification, the focus of this book,

neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. ... [T]his 'working on and against' is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of everyday struggles of resistance. (11-12)

Disidentification is intentionally a disparate collection of approaches that "captures, collects, and brings into play various theories of fragmentation" (31) and manages to be "a hermeneutic, a process of production, and a mode of performance" (25). Most of all, though, it is not something ironically tried on for size or voluntarily experimented with, but is rather "about clutural, material, and psychic survival" and "managing and negotiating historical trauma and systemic violence" (161).

Muñoz's main focus is queer people of colour. He argues that as people who are erased and highly oppressed by what they are called to be through dominant ideologies, wholehearted assimilation is possible only at great personal cost. Counteridentification is possible, and is sometimes important and necessary for survival, but, as mentioned above, still means living in ways organized by dominant ideologies. He suggests that disidentification is a strategy of everyday survival embraced (in largely untheorized ways) by queers of colour in relating to a cultural environment that erases and despises them. This basis in everyday resistance creates certain kinds of possibilities for more explicit political work and cultural production.

Muñoz explores these ideas by looking at a series of instances of cultural production by mostly U.S.-based queers of colour. This includes an examination of the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (in dialogue with a look at Andy Warhol's work); the work of African-American/Chicana drag queen Vaginal Davis; the presence of queers, especially Pedro Zamora, on MTV's The Real World; autoethnographic films by Richard Fung; work by Cuban-American queer feminist performer Ela Troyano; and more. Through these works, he explores modes of resistance by queer people of colour and the capacity for performance to mobilize "counterpublics" in ways that can break down isolation, contribute to shared meanings, and catalyze conditions for other kinds of change work.

I think this book seized my attention initially at the level of sensibility. After all, for all that complex and contradictory identifications are at work in how all of us come to understand ourselves, for those of us who do not experience the kind and extent of marginalization experienced by queers of colour in North America, and who in fact largely (even if not exclusively) benefit from harm and oppression done to others, such identifications do not play anything close to the same role in how we navigate the world. Still, there is something about disidentification as stance, as sensibility, that felt important to me from my first encounter with it -- something about its valuing of the everyday, its acceptance of inconsistency and contradiction, its refusal to be overwhelmed by a kind of puritanical, abstracted rejection of what is. I have always felt both a pull towards and a repulsion from the kinds of highly performative, often very divisive, approaches to counteridentification with current social relations exhibited by some privileged radicals, and I think more nuanced ways of relating to the world and to each other, and particularly to the everyday choices that oppressed and marginalized people must make to survive, are necessary.

Moreover, even though complex and contradictory identifications as experience, and disidentification as stance towards navigation, do not play the same role for those of us who benefit in significant ways from the oppressions of others, that doesn't mean that we won't benefit from understanding and making use of these phenomena in our own lives. In particular, I'm interested in how the moments of misfitting that all of us experience can be mobilized, both by ourselves in our own journeys and through critical pedagogy of various kinds, to catalyze at a visceral level the disidentification of relatively privileged subjects from aspects of self grounded in socially organized domination. It won't change the ways we benefit from horribly violent social relations, but perhaps it can be a path to becoming less attached to those benefits and creating space to work against them. Such questions are not addressed in this book, but it provides a place to start. And of course there are limits -- I first encountered the idea of disidentification in a paper by indigenous feminist Andrea Smith recommending that it would be a useful one to take up in the context of indigenous studies and anti-colonial political work, but also cautioning that on its own, even for the colonized subjects of primary interest to her, it might lead to loss of scope to take on truly transformative goals such as decolonization. That would be even more true for relatively privileged subjects. At the same time, critical whiteness theorist Ruth Frankenber has suggested that "it may be that a spiritual path of disidentification" is the key to "how to enter more deeply and self-consciously into one's racial identity in order to challenge it while making sure ... that any moves towards essentialism remain 'strategic." I think it's worth thinking about.

One thing I think I will need to do if I want to think further about such questions is get a firmer grounding in the work of Althusser and Pêcheux and the ways in which it underpins what this book has to say. I don't say that because I think I would be a particular fan of theirs, but rather to get a better picture than this book gives of the significant ways I suspect I would differ from the particular flavour of marxist theory that they use, and to understand what that means for taking up Muñoz's ideas. It would probably also allow me to get a deeper appreciation of what this book has to say if I were to seek some of the cultural works it talks about -- other than Basquiat and Warhol, I had not heard of any of the cultural producers it talks about. I really did appreciate the chance to get to know the various artists a little bit, though, through Muñoz's passion and close attention. In any case, I think there is a separate discussion to be had about how academic work that is seemingly at quite a remove from the day-to-day concerns of many radicals can actually be a valuable resource informing what we do, but I do think that we don't do ourselves any favours if we dismiss such sources of analysis out of hand. Not everyone will be interested in reading this kind of work, and that is perfectly understandable. But I think that those of us who are interested can do some of the work of bringing ideas from less accessible corners of theory into the movement contexts which we touch through our own organizing and through our writing, and seeing what is useful and what is not.

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

Review: The Memoir Project

[Marion Roach Smith. The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-standard Text for Writing and Life. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011.]

Despite the fact that most books about writing that are worth reading say pretty much the same things, I still like to read them -- that tendency in writers is something that writers who write about writing depend on to make a living, I think. Anyway, I was on a festive book-buying binge in the big city last weekend, and I successfully avoided buying anything for myself until the last really good store that I was in. I was resisting the urge because, thanks to school, I'm largely not in any need of nonfiction reading material for the next six months or so. But I couldn't resist. And this book was one of my indulgences.

My addiction to books about writing -- at least, to those that aren't those awful, misleading things that amount to lists of "tips" and "rules" -- was only one reason why this book caught my attention. I was also drawn to it because one major focus that emerged in some of the work I did in the past few months in one of my courses was theorizing about the role that memoir can play as theory and as contribution to social change, with an eye to actually doing some writing of that sort once I'm able to take on big projects again. I may or may not actually end up pursuing it, given that I have always been powerfully affected by reading such theory but have not always been comfortable talking about myself in ways that allow me to write it, but it's a possibility. So I picked this book up. I knew it was not going to be about quite the same uses of and approaches to memoir that interest me, but I thought it still might be useful.

My feelings about this book are mixed. Despite the commonality of advice among non-awful writing books, there is still a wide variation in how well such books work. The biggest distinguishing feature in this book's approach is a vehement opposition to engaging in writing that doesn't go anywhere. In some ways, I think this is great advice. For one, it opposes the tendency that some people have to engage in endless writing exercises rather than actually writing whatever it is that they claim they want to write. That particular strategy of not-writing is not one that has ever really captured me (though of course we all indulge our own repertoire of ways to not-write sooner or later and I am no exception). Nonetheless, I think there are lots of people who do do this kind of thing -- who write to avoid writing -- whether it is out of anxiety or not really knowing how to just plunge in and do it, and this book's point is simple and sensible: you can practice best while actually writing what you want to write, not while composing some pointless scene or undirected paragraph based on a random prompt. And that leads to the most important facet of this advice, which is the fact that one of the most important kinds of questions to constantly ask ourselves as we write is, "Why am I doing this? What do I want this piece to accomplish?" That is, our intent is crucial to how we write pretty much anything, to how we ground our decisions about what to say and how to say it, and we aren't going to get better as writers if we are not constantly returning to this question -- and exercise-based writing means we have no intent to return to. The importance of figuring out why we are writing a given piece, and of shaking off the habits we learn in high school of writing purely to obey instructions rather than to accomplish a goal, was, in fact, one of the central points I made at the writing workshop I facilitated back in the spring.

However, there are other ways in which I think this book's opposition to writing that is not already driving in a particular direction does its readers a disservice. I don't mean exercises, which I agree are largely pointless. Rather, I mean techniques like freewriting and undirected journalling. This book doesn't dwell on its opposition to such practices the way it does on exercises, but it does make a couple of snide asides about "morning pages," a term used by famous writing and creativity teacher Julia Cameron for the practice of doing a timed freewrite -- just keep the pen moving, writing whatever, even if it is the same word over and over again, until time is up -- as the first bit of work you do every day. And I just don't see that as pointless in the same sense that exercises can be. I mean, there is lots of room to say critical things about Cameron and her work, but morning pages are a very useful tool. Cameron may defend them in hopelessly flaky language, but they do get my pen moving and they do help me get into the work for the day. And there are other moments when freewrites, either wide-open or concentrated on a particular theme, have been absolutely crucial to me figuring out what intent I'm going to be writing with, when I get to the next stage of whatever it is I'm working on.

The book makes a few other really important points. For instance, its insight that memoir is not autobiography, and that memoir is not primarily about you, is important. Rather, memoir is about some theme or idea, and you use your own life to illustrate or explore that theme. That is an important distinction. Similarly, her emphasis on doing first drafts that just get words down on the page no matter how embarrassing or confused is hardly original, but her evocative phrase "vomit draft" graphically captures how first drafts should work. And her appropriation of "murder your darlings" from an early 20th century book on writing as advice for how to relate to editing is also cleverly put and well taken. By and large, though, the content is pretty standard, which is to say worth reading and well told but not particularly original, and in a few places it wanders dangerously close to decontextualized "rules" and "tips," albeit never the way that the not-worth-reading writing books do it.

There is something else about the book that bothers me, though, and I'm having trouble pinning down exactly what. It's not that the writing isn't good, because it is -- I suspect the author's newspaper experience means she can produce clean, clear, engaging prose faster and more dependably than I'll ever be able to, for instance. There are some great anecdotes, too, sometimes used in quite clever ways. But there is still something that bothers me, something that nudges me towards wariness about memoir in general. Partly, I think, it is because there were instances where the anecdotes were not well used, where the very act of deploying details of life with intent to drive the book forward felt too smooth, too neat, not real. This is consistent with experiences I've had elsewhere of mainstream memoir, where the complexities of life are left on the cutting room floor in the name of good writing, with no recognition of the pedagogical and political implications for the always-present but sometimes hidden element of memoir that is theorizing the social. It reminds me of the oral story telling of a couple of people that I know personally, which in some ways can be very engaging and shows an eye for what is "neat" in everyday life that I often don't have, but that also shows a tremendously heavy but largely unconscious hand in editing life and the social world to allow such moments of everydayness to emerge as simply tellable and enjoyable in a way that poses no danger to broad complacencies and refusals-to-know. I know that memoir doesn't have to be like this -- I've read more than enough that isn't like that to know that for one hundred percent certain -- but this book is a good, if unintentional, warning about one way that it can go.

Anyway, if you share my addiction to books about writing, this isn't a bad one to add to your collection. But if you are looking for the very best, or you only plan to read one or two books about writing, I wouldn't pick this one -- Pat Schneider and Natalie Goldberg remain my favourites.


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New Colours of Resistance Archive!

Just got this from a friend who has been involved in making this site happen:

We are excited to announce the launch of the Colours of Resistance Archive (http://www.coloursofresistance.org), a collection of anti-oppression resources for movement-building.

Colours of Resistance (COR) was a grassroots network of people in the U.S. and Canada who consciously worked to develop anti-racist, multiracial politics in the movement against global capitalism. This network existed from 2000 until 2006.

While the COR network was active, members produced a zine, a website, and published articles; shared ideas through local meetings and email discussion lists; and facilitated workshops and events across Canada and the U.S. Through this work, COR members aimed to help build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, multiracial, feminist, queer and trans liberationist, anti-authoritarian movement against global capitalism. COR members were also committed to integrating an anti-oppression framework and analysis into all of our work.

To learn more about the origins of COR, see this interview from 2003 with two of the network's founders, Pauline Hwang and Helen Luu: http://www.coloursofresistance.org/602/finding-colours-of-resistance-an-interview-with-pauline-hwang-and-helen-luu.

Over its existence, the COR network generated a substantial online collection of analyses and tools that continue to be relevant. We are pleased to offer this archive and make COR content available again. Check it out at http://www.coloursofresistance.org.

Please update any links you have to this material, and please share this archive widely with people and networks in your life who you think would find it useful.

In solidarity and struggle,
the former COR administrative collective

Check out all the great resources, and put them to use in a struggle near you!

Journalism and the Toronto G20

The final major piece of work that I have to do for school before the break is a paper looking at some of the ways that the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010 showed up in media discourse. I've dived back into that assignment in the last day or two after too long occupied with other tasks and I'm not looking forward to ploughing through the thick of it over the next six days in a manner sure to be too rushed for my taste, if not downright panicked. Nonetheless, it does mean that I have the chance to think through the meaning of some material that has a wide range of politics and that is often wrapped up in complicated ways with how fraught that event has been for movement-oriented spaces and people in Ontario -- including for me, despite the fact that I wasn't actually at the protests -- but that nonethless may be a way to get at some interesting things.

I may or may not post some or all of the larger work, but for today I just want to take the chance to write a quick post about one of the pieces I've run across: "Coverage of G20 poses challenge for journalists" by Kathy English. She is the Public Editor for the Toronto Star -- that is, apparently, a position that "encompasses the roles of reader advocate and guarantor of accuracy" -- and the piece was published on June 26, 2010, the first day of the summit.

Now, as someone who has been involved in alternative and independent media work to a greater or lesser extent for coming up on fifteen years, I harbour no illusions about corporate media -- much content published there can still be useful and there are lots of reasons why we can't just dismiss them, but, notwithstanding the exceptions and surprises that do manage to come along semi-regularly, the social relations and professional practices out of which dominant media is produced constrains what gets covered, how it gets covered, and what voices are present in some pretty major ways. So this post is written not in a tone of shock or surprise, but more with a kind of morbid fascination for how clearly inconsistent parts of this piece seem to me but how smoothly consistent they likely seemed to their author.

As the title indicates, the piece is about the "challenge for journalists" in covering something like the G20. The lead lays out pretty clearly where the piece is going to end up: "It's not every day that reporters and photographers are sent out into the streets of Toronto equipped with helmets and gas masks." Nonetheless, other content in the early paragraphs makes some useful points about the character of the G20 that could, if followed through, lead in more interesting directions.

For instance, the piece paraphrases Star editor Michael Cook as describing the paper's goal as being "to bring readers all aspects of this billion-dollar gathering of global head honchos." (Note: "all aspects.") It then points out that they have 50 journalists on the case -- quite a significant outlay of resources in this time of corporate media downsizing. Then it quotes Star city editor Graham Parley: "The biggest challenge is covering something that doesn't have an agenda," he says. "At the G20, most things are secret" and even those that aren't are subject to very restricted access.

The set-up seems obvious, right? An event of global scope at which decisions affecting millions if not billions of lives will be made. Secrets, many and important. A commitment to uncover "all aspects." A huge outlay of highly skilled person-power. With all of that, how can you not think of the heroic mythologies of journalism, the risk taking, the muckrakers, the jail time to protect sources, the ending of a presidency because of a hotel break-in. How can you not think that this is going to lead to a bit of bravado, a bit of chest-beating, about how hard the Star is going to work to ensure that every one of those secrets of this secret organization of global import will be laid before a thankful public -- just be sure to pay your $1.25! The "challenge" seems like it's going to be how to get those secrets from this powerful organization. Surely that's what's coming next, right?

Except here's the next paragraph:

Parley is most concerned with the unscripted events that may occur this weekend -- "The protests, the commute, the disruption to normal life. It means having to be flexible and keeping reporters on standby to go where the news is."

Ummmm...what?

And the entire rest of the article is about the possibility of conflict between police and protesters, and snippets of advice given by experts to local reporters about "how to get through a protest with minimal pain or injury."

There are lots of dodgy details in the doing of it. There is the perennial double standard of asking, "As protesters take to the streets this weekend to exercise their democratic right to dissent, will peace prevail?" without so much as a nod to the immeasurably greater violence that could be (and was) wrought by the decisions made inside the fence.

There is the use of the language of "training camps" to describe protesters sharing skills related to summit protests. I might just be out of the loop, but I'm pretty sure we mostly don't use that language ourselves -- that's language that the mainstream media uses to talk about terrorists and Taliban, and that's probably what it will evoke in readers in this usage.

Then there is the warning about possible violence from cops: "Rubber bullets, at close range, will break bones." Compare this to the following sentence: "If you are stationed at an active fence demonstration, consider a helmet. Hardcore protesters throw rocks." When it is a caution about violence from police, there is no agent specified -- the rubber bullets themselves are taking action. But when it is a caution about the other side, well, it is protesters who are doing the doing.

In the next paragraph, the police are named as a possible danger, but check out the careful rationalization built in to this sentence: "If you look like a protester, you are more likely to be treated as one by riot police." Contrast this with the following sentence: "If you don't dress like [a protester], more militant protesters may surmise that you are a member of the mainstream media or police and target you." This last is especially rich, given that I am aware of no instances in summit protests of bystanders or media being assaulted randomly by protesters -- and perhaps, just perhaps, there has been an instance or two over the last 12 years, but it is not, as this implies, some common phenomenon -- whereas I am aware of many instances of them being assaulted randomly by cops. And the language of targeting is in contrast with a mention in the next paragraph of "riot police in the heat of the moment may not care if you are press." Protesters "target" while riot police are carried away "in the heat of the moment."

All of which is minor in comparison with the bait-and-switch of the piece as a whole -- the insistence that the "challenge for journalists" is not the fact that there is this immensely powerful institution that doesn't want to give out information, the raw material of journalistic work, but rather it is the potential for conflict in the streets. And this is entirely consistent with the larger pattern I'm seeing emerge in the work, which is the near absence of the G20 itself from the media discourse in this period. I mean, it gets named frequently, but this article illustrates one common technique by which it is named without content, through the substitution of the spectacle of the conflict (or the inconvenience, or the fence, or the expense) for the actual substance of how the G20 functions, of its vicious austerity agenda, and of the ways in which such decisions trickle down and become pain in ordinary lives. (Interestingly, and this may be a topic for another post, this was not limited to the corporate media but also present in a different way in much alternative and independent work on the topic.)

Anyway, it sure was a good thing that the Star's "reader advocate and guarantor of accuracy" was on the case, eh?