Showing posts with label intersectionality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intersectionality. Show all posts

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Seriously Still Don't Get It

I will admit that while I have identified myself as a feminist from a very young age (I had pro-choice buttons on my backpack in middle school {yeah I was a trouble maker, how did you know?}) I really didn't get too into the community and any kind of activism until much later, like, college. I worked with the Women's Program at the American Friend's Service Committee as a co-op in my sophomore year of college. I learned a great deal there that I hadn't known before, and I'll admit, there were only two women (out of five) in the office who were under the age of thirty at the time, myself and the other volunteer intern. Even the two of us were radically different in age, I being an undergrad and her almost finished grad school.

One thing I didn't learn about was the weird age/generation/wave schism that rears its head in the feminist blogosphere pretty regularly.
(Note: I noticed some icky framing of race issues in this linked article, Suzie essentially saying that since there have been women of color in power positions at NOW, that arguing for a woman of color to get the presidency of said organization is not a valid argument. Frankly, it doesn't surprise me, which is almost sadder than the fact that she didn't realize she said it. I hate expecting this shit from other white feminists. I really do.)

I find this entire discussion to be singularly odd, and particularly unhelpful and not constructive in the least.

It seems to mostly take form as a discussion about "second-wave" feminism and "third-wave" feminism, and the Perpetual Battle For The Mantle Of Feminist Leadership of the two incarnations. It almost always comes down to older women v. younger women, with a fairly arbitrary divide over who is considered "older" or "younger." Now me, I was not aware that I was part of a movement and the follower of a philosophy that required me to find a label and snuggle down in my little box with it.

I know there are issues with the movement and hierarchies within it. I criticize them myself, and some of the greatest activist voices I know of are regular critics of those flaws. That is part of the liberation process. No anti-oppression group/organization/philosophy is born whole from the head of Zeus as a perfect entity. Any group we form as people living within a kyriarchical society is going to contain echoes of said kyriarchy. When it is all you know, and you have been soaking in it for the whole of your existence, then the unconscious part of it, the things that don't personally hurt you, will carry over until you recognize and deal with them. That is one of the biggest functions of privilege. How the member of that group and those it purports to serve deal with that is a measure of many things.

I continue to own the label of "Feminist" because I feel it is my job as a relatively privileged person, to work to improve the movement. Its a tough job, and all I can find the energy to focus on is the issues of how race, transphobia, and heteronormativity still inform so much feminist discourse. I don't have time to even work on anything else and I have less to do in many ways than some of the other people I have met who do more.

So why do so many feminists make the whole "second-wave" v. "third-wave" issue so huge? With all the shit we have to work on in our own movement, is it really necessary to have a generation gap with economically, racially and gender privileged people on each side stomping their foot about how "no one understands me!" when people of color, trans*people, poor people, and every permutation in between of possible intersections of those and other ignored groups in this movement are still sitting outside the glass dome?

My understanding of these labels is that they are used in a historical context to help differentiate the goals of certain generations of anti-oppression movements. I dislike them being used at all because they are limiting in the extreme. I thought this whole thing was about rejecting the labels used to reduce us and our work. Was I wrong? Or are you?

Y'all can fight each other, but I have shit to do, like fucking try to fix things in this world. Any time you want to stop navel gazing and complaining about how you deserve respect from someone you haven't earned it from, and stop making it about you, I'll be over here with the rest of us pulling your load for you.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

I am so pissed off right now

Breaking the silence: On Living Pro-Lifer's Choice for Women

I have to say, I am utterly shocked. And LIVID. What exactly are women supposed to do? We choose to go through with and give birth to an unplanned pregnancy? We are selfish, or stupid and deserve any hardship it causes unless we are white and financially well off. We choose to have an abortion? Then we are cold, heartless, baby-killing harpies. We choose to give the resulting baby up for adoption? Then we are selfish and/or heartless failures as women because we didn't want to follow our "maternal instincts" (puke) and become good little obedient child raisers, unless we are women of color, or poor, in which case, see point number one. We choose never to have children at all by being sterilized before its an issue? Then we are failures as women, except for WoC and poor women. Then we are just doing what we should to leave the population to the privileged.

I see no reason to play their fucking game. We will lose no matter what, purely by virtue of daring to exist while female and think that we are actually people with the right to live as we see fit.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Why I am a purist

I love sci-fi and fantasy. I was raised in the era of movies like The Dark Crystal, Legend, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, the Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn...My parents helped. We always had sci-fi books laying around the house (I still read the entire original Dune series once a year or so) and my mom would tape things like Red Sonya or Neverending Story for us to watch over and over again.

As I got older, I started getting a little pickier about my books. There were some tropes that seemed ever-present in fantasy specifically that bugged me to no end, the handsome hero swinging his phallus replacement around to protect the fragile but oh so beautiful princess from being touched. If I was lucky, the fragile princess would have power of her own, but it was almost inevitably magic of some kind, which allowed her to stay on the fringes of any battle and usually was the excuse for her weak constitution. Even female heroes would end up saved by the man yet again, regardless of her own strength.

Eventually, my mother (who can be seriously awesome) introduced me to Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. This series seems to fall victim to some of the usual tropes at first, but very quickly it is revealed that not all is as it seems in that regard. The series is full of strong female characters, and by that I don't mean "Strong Female" characters, but strong characters that happen to be female. Its not a perfect series, but it does amazingly well in the gender department. Goodkind displays an amazing depth of insight into female perspectives, experiences and realities.

Can you imagine my joy when I found out they were making a TV series?

Absolute. Pure. Bliss.

Then I watched it.

I've read Backlash, I should not have been surprised. I should have expected that the entertainment industry would sap all individual personality from the female characters and insert tired old tropes about how women "really are." It doesn't matter if the character is essentially in charge of an entire council of nations and is the highest authority in the land. Underneath it all shes just a weak little girl who needs men to save her. She still has her amazing power, but now using it ONCE makes her faint like a delicate fucking wilted flower!

Additionally, the racial characterization is unbelievable. Why, pray tell, is the one character which was written with a specific speech pattern ie "I am" becomes "I be" (meant to indicate her native language's grammatical structure conflicting with the language she currently speaks) cast as a woman of color? Especially when this character was not originally written so? To make it worse, shes a sorceress who lives in a hut full of bones, and uses bones to ward off the underworld. Cue the "mystical POC/ voodoo preistess" stereotype. Tia Dalma anyone?

Theres more, but frankly, it isn't even worth addressing in some ways, cause we have heard it all before.

In all honestly, I wish I could even be anything other than bored and disappointed.

In short, don't bother with "Legend of the Seeker" As usual, the Western entertainment industry took perfectly good source material that actually portrays a complex world and boiled it down to the things that make white guys feel most comfortable.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Same Shit, Different Day

Dear US, US based mainstream media, and various other information outlets,

Please stop it with the judgments of Nadya Suleman. I am so sick of hearing about this that I could puke. Asking if she should be "allowed" to give birth to octuplets when she already has six children is an irresponsible question. Her body, her life and her choice. So they may end up on some sort of public assistance. Who the fuck cares? no really, who cares? Some of y'all think you shouldn't have to pay for her choices because you think they are irresponsible. I get it. I also think thats a pretty fucking cold Regan-esque thing to say. These are children, they are here and they are alive, and they deserve a chance at a decent life, regardless of how desperately you want to judge their mother. Unless you really think your self-righteous posturing about how this woman is a leech, insane or worse is more important than feeding children who haven't done anything but be born. And seriously, Yahoo news...the whole family may end up costing a whole 1.3 million dollars as a scare tactic? That means one dollar from a million taxpayers. How many taxpayers do we have in this country, hmm? Purposefully inflating that number to feed into the welfare wank? THATS fucking irresponsible.

Honestly, judging women for their reproductive choices is so fucking old-meme I don't even know where to begin. Besides, if she were a white woman with a husband everyone would be cooing over the pwecious widdle babies and TLC would be falling all over itself to give her a TV show and years worth of free shit.

Just cut it the fuck out already.

love and kisses,

me

Friday, January 16, 2009

The Crime of Being

Okay, this has been sitting in my head for way too long. I'm prone to depression and tend to end up in this strange fugue state where all I can do is play mindless free flash games online and try to pretend that the world is not as scary as it actually is.

What scares me?

Many things scare me; spiders, plane crashes, driving too fast (its an anxiety thing due to fear of police), losing my front teeth, water where I can't touch the bottom or see it (pools are okay, oceans and lakes? fuck that noise), getting cancer...

However, none of those things holds a candle to the fear that I feel for the lives of people that I love. I come from a position of relative privilege to them. First, my gender presentation and my body(along with the social assignment of my gender based on secondary sexual characteristics) generally match, and second, I'm white. For these people who are very dear to me, one or both of these things are not true. And what terrifies me more than the idea of driving too fast in a car filled with spiders, while on the phone with my doctor who is telling me I have cancer, just as a plane crashes in front of me, making me swerve into a bottomless lake and knock out my front teeth on the steering wheel, is the idea that for people like my friends who do not share my whiteness or my apparent cis-ness, they can be murdered for simply daring to exist, and their murderers excused because we live in a world that does not value the personhood of their victims. We live in a world that constructs my firends as mutilated freaks, sexual deviants and "faking it". They can't even lobby for laws to protect their ability to go into the bathroom that they are less likely to get assaulted in without being conflated with perverts, pedophiles, and sexual predators.

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If you go back and look at the list of the dead for the Trans Day Of Remembrance, you may notice that when discussing violence against transpeople, we are talking about more that transphobia, transmisogyny, or homophobia. Considering that approximately 70% of the names on the list belong to women of color, we are also talking racism.


These cases are often treated with boxing gloves by the media and general public, with the assumption that a black transwoman must be a sex worker, and that she was probably killed when her john discovered her penis, and the persistent use of incorrect pronouns by the media, which is a basic journalistic no-no indicating more the refusal of the "journalist" to overlook their own biases while reporting. With the prevalence of the "trans panic" defense and how it seems to fly pretty well with the media and sometimes the court system, it seems pretty clear that black transwomen's lives are less valuable than the offended manhood of some schmuck that thinks that the appropriate way to react to a situation like this is killing someone. They are killed for not being the "right" kind of woman.

The media and general public opinion seems to want to construct these women as "bringing it on themselves" for "lying" about "what they really are," as if your very existence and the fact that it triggers some homophobia in the person who decided that murdering you is the only way to deal with it is your fault. When police in a city assault a black transwoman and she is later found dead, and in the same city, another transwoman is found shot three times there is clearly no official justice for these women.

In actuality, the lives of transpeople, especially transwomen of color, are in more danger than the average cis-person. Constructing transpeople as some sort of dangerous menace, beyond being insulting as hell, is factually inaccurate.

Even the cis-partners of transpeople are considered legitimate targets for this hate violence.

I have an obligation, to my friends and to my morals, to not be silent. To not let the hate of the world keep me hidden in my home, frozen and unable to act. These women were someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's lover. They could be mine, or yours. regardless of their bodies and the social constructions that others must cling to so tightly that life no longer has value, they deserve to be valued.

I will not be silent about their lives. I will not be silent about the loss of them.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

What?!

(h/t to almost every progressive blog I read)

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I saw this last week and had to take a second to put my jaw back in place. Christ. How fucking EDGY is The Advocate! Conflating the black civil rights movement with the LGBTQI movement and it's oh-so-important fight for marriage equality.

Look, I'm queer. As queer as a $3 bill. HOWEVER, I am not so arrogant as to believe that my relatively privileged fight for the right to marry someone of the same legal sex as myself is the last great civil rights issue! Not when institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia (to name only a few) are issues that are causing people to live in poverty, face threats of and actual physical and sexual assault from not only other individuals but from law enforcement officers, face court battles to even have their victimizers recognized as such, and...lessee...um...oh yeah! FUCKING DEATH!

Don't get me wrong. I would love it if people like me could just hang up our activist badges and go home, if there really was something that was really the last civil rights struggle ever ever ever. However, as pointed out above, this is patently untrue.

Suggesting that "Gay is the new Black" ignores the existence of queers who are also of color, who have to face racism, homophobia and sexism. It also ignores the fact that a good deal of the queer community is not served by the fight for marriage equality, and effectively disappear their members who are in need of things that are more essential than marriage.

This cover implies that all other civil rights movements are over and unimportant. The only purpose something like this will serve will be to alienate members of the POC community as well as any other groups that are not served by the marriage fight. It doesn't help that the article that this cover is in reference to is actually a decent article. This cover is a disservice to the author, and to the queer movement as a whole.

In short, fuck whoever at The Advocate thought this would be a good idea. Nice breakin' it "hero."

Saturday, November 15, 2008

The Spirit of the Stairs

So...privilege.

It's an important, and critical idea, and one I have been dancing around trying to parse out how I want to talk about for days now. I have written and re-written this entry, and have given up on it a few times. However, as far as the intent behind this space, an understanding of privilege and how it works is needed.

The need for this was touched off by several things, some in my own life, and some in the rest of the US.

One of the personal: a gentleman who was otherwise quite nice, who felt privileged enough to say some "well-intentioned" (scare quotes intended) but profoundly homophobic things to me while I was working. It was enough to send me running for a large Americano with an extra espresso shot (for those playing the home game, that would come to four shots of espresso, with the rest of the 18oz. cup filled with steamed water) which I am now sipping and feeling the caffeine tingle to the ends of my extremities.

Another is one friend of mine who repeatedly claims that I go too far on the "female" stuff, and that he feels that I am being unbalanced because I never talk about the problems that men face, and conversely never talk about women as "being at fault" for anything. According to him, I blame men for everything, and let women coast by regardless of whether they deserve to or not. When I call him on the fact that inequalities for women outnumber inequalities for men, he hedges with "well, we should all just be good to each other, but it has to be FAIR," or if I point out that the system that hurts women also hurts men, he moves the goalposts "well some people are just LIKE THAT" or "Some women bring it on themselves."

In the rest of my country, there are simultaneous issues that are encased in layers of problematic privilege with regards to how they are addressed and with regards to the fact that they have even occurred.

One is the passing of Proposition 8 in California, which is problematic on its own. It doesn't help that it's passing is being blamed on POC voters in CA, which is exposing the latent racism of the mainstream, assimilationist GLBTQI movement (which tends to exclude all but the white, able-bodied, cis-gendered men anyway)

In combination with the utter outrage at Prop 8 is the lack of outrage from the same exclusionary GLBTQI community at the murder of yet another trans-woman of color, Duanna Johnson, a woman who had previously been harrassed and assaulted by Memphis police officers, purely because of her gender and her color, who has subsequently been found dead.

For my situation, and how it relates to privilege as well as everything I have mentioned thus far, to make sense, some things about me need to be understood.

1- Yes, I am queer.

2- Yes, I am married.

3- No, my marriage, despite current appearances, is not heterosexual.

4- I am also female-identified, white, able-bodied, poor by Western standards, and feminist without apology.

The problem here is privilege.

What is privilege, you ask?

Privilege is: About how society accommodates you. It’s about advantages you have that you think are normal. It’s about you being normal, and others being the deviation from normal. It’s about fate dealing from the bottom of the deck on your behalf.
-Betty, A primer on privilege.


The man who talked to me this morning was privileged. He assumed when he saw my wedding ring, that since I was married, then I must be straight. His privilege is the ability to assume that marriage is for straight people only, to assume that every person he talks to is most likely not queer, and to assume that I am going to agree with him, because only straight people can be married.

My friend is privileged. His privilege is to be able to assume that he will be included in all things, since most things in our culture tend to be geared towards straight white cis-males like himself. He assumes that his experience is universal, that all men think as he does, and that anything that goes against that is prejudiced against him. His experience must be addressed or he is oppressed. He assumes that fair looks like he wants it to without accounting for the perspective of others. He feels entitled to attention, and to care from activists that don't address his needs, despite the fact that the issues that impact them the most have little to nothing to do with him.

The racist element of the GLBTQI movement is privileged. They can assume that another minority group will support them on the basis of some assumed shared oppression without ever explicitly asking that group for support, they can pretend like there is no intersection of identities, and therefore "erase" POC who are also queer. In cases like Duanna Johnson, they are more than willing to throw our trans* brothers and sister under the bus, as well as anyone else who is not easily assimilate-able in order to further their own quest for rights, regardless if those rights are what the rest of the community actually needs.

I am privileged. I live in the West, where my standard of living as a poor person is at least three times as good as women in developing countries. I can eat food that is out of season, I have access to medicine, media, and computers. I have a job and don't have to ask my family for permission to live my life. I am also white, and can be sure, when walking down the street, that no one is assuming I am a "welfare queen" or that I am a drug addict, or a thief, or a sex-worker. My gender identity, for the most part, matches my gender presentation, so I do not get intrusive stares and speculations about what I "really" am.

My point is, despite these groups and myself all being privileged, there is one major resounding difference.

I am aware of the ways in which I am privileged and have made it a personal quest to minimize my privilege as much as possible. It's a technique that I call, "How to not be a total fucking asshole." This is not to say that I don't fuck up, I do. I will act privileged, partially because the nature of privilege is to be invisible to those who benefit most from it.

Privilege, at its core, is the advantages that people benefit from based solely on their social status. It is a status that is conferred by society to certain groups, not seized by individuals, which is why it can be difficult sometimes to see one’s own privilege.
-Feminism 101 blog What is male privilege


However, I am open to being called on it, and I am willing to self-examine at any time to make sure that my words and actions match with a progressive attitude towards ending oppression. It's the least I can do to make up for the benefits I get because of my privilege.

I do not call myself an ally, I don't need to be put on a pedestal as a paragon of progressiveness. I am just a person, a privileged person, who has chosen not to be an asshole.