Belated second sketchy contribution on intersectionality. I recommend looking at Identity Politics and Intersectionality first.
1. Intersectional thinking, informed in general by some kind of identity politics/new social movement theory accepts, in the abstract, that gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, etc. are constituted by and through social relations. These relations are also relationships characterised at greater and lesser degrees by domination, discrimination, subordination, oppression, inequality, and silencing.
2. While acknowledging it in theory, the relational character of oppression tends to recognition in the breach than in the observance. Intersectionality is too often identified with the breakdown of attempts to think through the ways multiple oppressions work together, when its promise lies in overcoming their compartmentalisation. Intersectionality is not about an inverted hierarchy of oppression, scoring points for having it worse than others, or privilege checking as a precondition of solidarity.
3. The compartmentalisation of oppressed social locations is neither a matter of faulty theory or misinterpretation, but an effect of how the social relations constituting these positions work. It is an outcome, condensed theoretically, of experience. One cannot help but notice, for example, that the UK's new, post-Twitter generation of prominent feminist voices tend to be white, alumnus of top universities, reside in London and have solidly middle class backgrounds. The problem of which "we" these feminists speak of and for finds itself replayed 30 years after bell hooks diagnosed the problem in the seminal Ain't I A Woman?. But it's more than a question of who gets more CIF slots and retweets. It's a symptom of an underlying political economy of oppression, of being disadvantaged in some circumstances and benefiting from advantage in others. It is the latter that tends to generate axes of tension, making axes of solidarity based on shared characteristics difficult.
4. There are theoretically possible routes out of the impasse. The first of these is intersubjectivity. Sloppy, pathologised forms of identity politics valorises the unique qualities of one's subject position. No straight white man can hope to understand what it's like being a gay black guy. An impassable gulf separates able-bodied from disabled feminists. This, of course, is utter nonsense that fetishises oppression instead of challenging it. We are thinking, feeling, empathising creatures. Human beings are not cold appendages of interests, arrived at schematically. Social divisions do not prevent the more privileged and advantageous from sympathising, solidarising and allying with the oppressed - the history of each and every radical social movement tells us that. Likewise the reverse is true - our capacity for empathy is tugged on to shore up support for the arrangements ruling over us. The millions who grieved for Princess Diana. The millions who identify with celebrities. On and on it goes.
5. Intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for overcoming the pathologisation of identity politics, but is not sufficient. Taken in isolation it has its own dangers. In short, it can amount to an over-theorised notion of simply being nice and respectful or, as Bill and Ted might put it, being excellent to each other. In so doing it reduces sexism, racism etc. to matters of ignorance or individual nastiness. Questions of power are not relevant, they are pushed out of the picture.
6. The other is to give up on coordinated intersectional politics entirely. Just stick to ploughing your own identity furrow and let others get on with theirs. Laissez faire will sort things out, one hopes. Or dust off a master category and subsume everything to that by treating other differences as secondary. In both cases, this is a recipe for less efficacy and more pathology.
7. Perhaps understandably, intersectional thinking has tended to overlook class. Like gender, like ethnicity, like sexuality, like disability, class is a dynamic social relationship systematically reproduced across capitalist societies that is absolutely essential to its reproduction.
8. Too much received sociological commentary reduces class to status or, worse, occupational category. While important and vital to social critique and intersectional politics, an understanding of class as a relation, as a process takes us into capitalism's guts. And what we find there is a simple, banal truth that intersectional politics has forgotten. The overwhelming majority of people have to work for a living.
9. Basic Marxism. In advanced capitalist societies, there are those who own significant quantities of capital and those who do not. The people that do, whether by direct employment or through various intermediaries invest their capital to make a profit, from which they derive an income. The source of profits derives from the labour of others. Capital, collectively, employs a propertyless mass of people (the proletariat) to produce commodities. It doesn't matter whether they're material or "immaterial", the point is the full value of what is produced is not returned to the producer. They have signed up for X quantity of hours in return for a wage or salary. The value realised by the sale of commodities accrues to the employer. Hence this difference - surplus value - is abstract and hidden, and yet can be discerned from the social behaviour of employers and employees. They act as if surplus value is as tangible and real as the sturdy wooden desk my computer rests on.
10. This is where the notion of material interest comes into play. Capital in general is a blind social process. To perpetuate itself (and the owners who depend on it for income) it has to constantly seek new ways of generating greater and greater profits. Seeking markets is one element of this - after all, if no one buys your goods you won't make your money back, let alone see any profit. Where individual capitals exert direct control is in the production process, where it faces the irresistible impetus to drive costs down. Typically this has been via an intensification of the labour process, where the application of technology makes employees more productive - at the cost of little or no extra wages, or by lengthening the working day or reining in pay and benefits. From this standpoint workers are reduced to inputs, to figures winking on a monitor. They are a resource to be managed, or an inconvenience to whittle away. It's not so much a case of Marxism and socialism reducing human beings to proletarians, it's a matter of theory describing a real, concrete process.
11. From the standpoint of capital then, workers are only a means to an end. People are employed to make money. Capital buys labour power for a set number of hours, and that's it. As long as management's right to manage is sacrosanct in its workplaces, it mostly doesn't care what its workers do in their own time. Likewise, despite the best efforts of the media, education, and institutional dictates, we sell our labour power because we have to, not because we want to. And in this relationship, working people too have definite sets of interests. These aren't the result of a thought experiment; struggling around and asserting these interests have had concrete impacts on each and every capitalist society. There's the obvious - capital has an interest in depressing wages, labour has an interest in raising them; capital has an interest in lengthening the working day, labour has an interest in stopping this encroachment on free time. Capital wants its workers subordinated completely to the needs of the business, labour wants the business to fit round their lives. Capital wants to treat its employees like cogs, labour demands to be treated like human beings. This is the stuff of class struggle.
12. The majority of women are dependent on a wage. The majority of men are dependent on a wage. The majority of white people are dependent on a wage. The majority of the global non-white majority are dependent on a wage. Straight people, gay people, bi-people, trans people, the majority of all these are dependent on a wage. Able or disabled; oppressed nationality, oppressor nationality, the one thing they have in common, the experience cutting through the sections and intersections is the experience of the capitalist workplace. Of their subordination to the demands and dictates of capital. You can see why, historically, class has been privileged by labour movements, social democratic parties, and communist parties. So, are we back to the beginning? Is class the lynchpin?
13. Yes. And no. Capital is constituted by struggle. When we sell our labour power, we get caught up in it. There is no escape. But this does not mean everything is "reducible" to class, at least not class narrowly defined in traditional terms. As wage labourers, as proletarians, there is a political economy to how we, as a variegated collection of human beings, reproduce ourselves as such. We reproduce our physical bodies through eating, resting and, yes, actually reproducing; and we reproduce ourselves as social beings in the many varied social contexts that mark our lives as gendered, raced, sexualised people. The former is a physical necessity, the latter is, theoretically, the realm of freedom. It is the space in which we can realise ourselves. We give up chunks of our lives not just to survive, but so we have the resources that allow us to follow our inclinations.
14. The political economy of wage labour, however, is not an idyllic place. The realm of freedom is, too much, a realm of privatised freedom, of seeking comfort in one's peccadilloes before heading back out to the daily grind. The realm of freedom is also potential freedom. Because, for too many people, it's the opposite. Reproducing oneself socially and culturally (and physically) is not a free-floating matter. It is under certain conditions, under the weight of history and convention, and through patterns of certain social institutions. This is the place of the family, the traditional bastion of gender roles, compulsory heterosexuality, and the rule of the father. It is the place of community, of what constitutes an insider and who is coded an outsider. It's the space of the environment, of whether you live in a nice place or a run down estate suffering the effects of crime and pollution. It's the dimension of social and cultural capital, of the networks and status you command - or don't.
15. This is the home, the wellspring of the oppressions addressed by identity politics and intersectionality. As vulgar class politics have treated human beings as wage earners who need to get over their divisions - a critique of the political economy of capital while forgetting/ignoring the political economy of wage labour, you might argue that intersectionality is an attempt to theorise and reconcile the divisions within the political economy of the latter while bracketing the political economy of capital. This is why both have floundered. The former emphasises the simple at the expense of the complex. The latter, the complex at the expense of the simple. The bulk of the proletariat is intersectional. The bulk of the intersectional is proletarian.
16. The separation of the two political economies is an analytical separation. While at work, you might spend your time thinking about the weekend. At the weekend, you might find yourself thinking about work. The values, ideas, prejudices that have taken root outside of the workplace can be and often are carried into the workplace. Capital too has proven adept at using these social divisions - gender, race, sexuality, religion, nationality and status - to help atomise workforces in its ceaseless hunger for more surplus value, more profit. Solidarity is harder to deliver across colour bars and sectarian division.
17. This is where intersectional and class politics, erm, intersect. Exploiting divisions among workers can reinforce divisions among workers. Throwing millions of women out of work after the first and second world wars for the returning men reinforced patriarchy, made them economically dependent on their husbands, and strengthened a strict gendered division of labour in work. Proletarian men benefited - they had their jobs, and, culturally speaking, they were entitled to keep a woman along the lines of the bourgeois home, with its male head and wife/mother. Capital obviously benefited. And women lost out. Privileging either, in this instance, skews the analysis and therefore the political response. Hence, while the two political economies are analytically separate, the struggles in each are tangled up with one another.
18. For those who doubt the salience of class politics, the fact labour movements are growing in the developing world, and have knocked about the advanced capitalist nations just shy of two centuries suggests that doubting is somewhat overstated. Their basic, most basic function, is to bring working people together to face their employers as a disciplined collective. It's far more difficult for capital to pursue its relentless race to the bottom in an organised workplace. Yet in postmodern/identity, and intersectional thinking, labour movements are generally neglected as agents of change. Partly, perhaps, they present as dull and plodding whereas new social movements and their antecedents are fresh, but also because labour movements were occasionally the villains of the piece. Colour bars, gender bars, excluding oppressed nationalities, labour movements at various times and in various places have not only enforced them, but initiated them. This is because then, as now, labour movements are movements of working people as you find them.
19. Yet labour movements have come a long way. They're not perfect. The legacy of gendered and racialised divisions of labour still mark certain sectors of it. Yet, in general terms, they have moved from being a brake on the intersectionality of the working class to facilitating it. What other movement is committed to attacking sexism, racism, homo and transphobia? What other movement throws together people from different faiths and none, actively seeks to recruit resident and immigrant workers, and addresses issues from the workplace to environment, health, economics and quality of life and actively works toward their progressive resolution? There is no other such movement. Except for the labour movement.
20. The solution to intersectionality's quandary, of the theoretical glue that can hold it together, is a fundamentally open socialist politics grounded in the mass, intersectional labour movement that already exists. Class politics, so theorised, also has to reflect the actual intersecting, nuanced practice of the labour movement as it is now. Basically, what's on the table is a merger that's long been established. It's time theory caught up with practice. Struggles around gender, ethnicity and sexuality, and class struggles are part and parcel of the same. Every permutation of identity, the working class is it. And if you look at the other end, when you ask "who benefits?" from intersecting oppression and class exploitation, time after time it's the same group of people - the 1%, the bourgeoisie, the establishment, the power elite, the ruling class.
21. The labour movement is a class movement. It is an intersectional movement. As such it represents a persistent threat to the rule of capital, and, in embryo, speaks of the possibility of a future beyond capitalism. It is a movement articulating the universal interests of the overwhelming majority of people. Get stuck in.
Fashion has boldly gone where no style has explored before. If 2014 will be remembered for anything lighthearted, it will be the side-saddle swimming trunks. Late to the comment party as per, this product - as modelled by self-styled 'Gay Kardashians', Bobby Norris and Harry Derbidge from TOWIE - manages the tricky task of undermining and reinforcing traditional notions of masculinity. That, and it has got people talking. Just how do they stay up?
Capital has fully colonised women's bodies. Potions 'n' lotions, make up, hair removal, and so on, every conceivable facet of the female body has a mass market clustered around it. For men, on the other hand, its invasion by market forces is less pervasive, its commodification not as thorough. This isn't to say the commercialised male body beautiful does not exist. Creams, razors, smellies, hair loss treatments, these are hardly recent innovations. Ideal-typical masculinity is marketed, exploited. It plays football, wears the fashions, commits acts of hyperviolence, and fucks its way through porn flicks. The commodification, however, proceeds differently. Too often, women's bodies are marketed/positioned as passive objects, as foils for men's desires and egos, as - for want of a better phrase - service providers. Mother, whore, sidekick, or saint, the tropes are different but there is an identity of content, an undergirding theme. Not so with men. The man is the agent, not the object of desire. As with anything and everything social, this hegemonic conceit is challengeable and is challenged. The het gendering of desirable bodies carries on regardless, hence why make up, dedicated razors for legs, chests and pubes are, for men, at best niche products. When was the last time you saw something marketed as a 'masculine hygiene product'?
Gay men's bodies problematise this persistent dichotomy. It's interesting. The hegemonic gay body has shifted from the so macho, moustachioed hunk of the Village People/Freddie Mercury archetype to the camp, coiffured, on trend fashionista of, well, TOWIE. That hasn't been the only switch. The gay body of yesteryear was a manly body pump-primed for sex. Recall the AIDS panic of 30 years ago, and the homophobic elision between licentious promiscuity and disease stirred up by sundry bigots. Now, it's almost as if sex has been written out. When Boy George quipped he preferred a cup of tea to a bonk, he unwittingly was a harbinger of the sexless gay guy to come. Of course, gay men have sex and always will. But the gay body for the popular (straight) audience has been desexualised or, to be more accurate, rendered bodies without desire. Mediatised gay bodies don't speak of sex, they speak of campery, frippery and immaculate self-presentation. Less queen, more Queen Mother. Less agent. More object.
The bodies of Bobby and Harry have been positioned by the celebrity press as passive objects - there is little qualitative difference with the copious swimwear shoots of women's bodies crowding the sidebar of shame. And the photos invite us to ogle them, with a special stress on "the package". The side-saddle trunks reveal almost as much as they conceal. Is that a stray pube? Could that be the outline of his johnson? Bobby and Harry have therefore made a contribution to aesthetics of the pubis, a concern that's usually the preserve of women. Their "intervention" has crossed a gendered boundary: the media simply do not look at men in this way. With their smart tatts, designer shades, eyebrows to die for and skimpy underwear, Bobby and Harry have subverted the gendering of taste.
While our TOWIE friends in collaboration with the media have invented a new way of seeing the male body, thereby undermining its agency vis a vis the passive, feminine other; they're strengthening its traditional positioning too. Bobby and Harry clearly look after themselves. No hint of flab, and there is tone and muscle definition. It speaks of self-discipline and working out. As gender-troubling the side-saddle trunks are, what kind of body could carry it off? A gay body, definitely. But not one with double D moobs and a beer baby. To queer masculinity as effectively as Bobby and Harry, you have to take a manly body - one that a great many "conventional" straight blokes wouldn't mind having - and stick it in a fancy jock strap.
There we have it, a disturbance of gender norms that got millions talking. Bobby and Harry are unlikely gender queer heroes. Yet, at the moment of the transgression, as the fabric clings to their loins it reconfirms the hegemonic masculine hard body. It undermines and reasserts. Problematising the body depends on the body. The body depends on problematising the body.
Who knew the side-saddle swimming trunks would expose this much?
Eurovision is merely the continuation of politics by other, musical means. Usually, the popular perception is of nepotistic voting, of kindred nation supporting kindred nation. Witness Greece and Cyprus, the Scandinavian countries, and so on. Another persistent trope is to read the blunt force trauma of geopolitics into the granting of points. Everyone east of the Vistula, for example, habitually votes Russia because Papa Putin will turn off the gas otherwise. Or so the argument goes. But last night something different happened. The blocs of old melted as gender and sexual politics came to the fore. Against the backdrop of Belarus and Russian protests, hostility at home, and homophobia from a fellow contestant, Austria's Conchita Wurst swept the board and lifted the Eurovision crown.
Rise Like a Phoenix is a great song, and was the best on offer last night. But even had it not Conchita's victory would have been the most positive possible outcome, especially in light of the above (though it's worth noting Armenia's Aram MP3 later apologised for his remarks). There is a ugly homophobia abroad at the moment, particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia. Much like the new misogyny, I believe it's a reaction to the normalisation of same sex relationships and "non-traditional" ways of living. Except in the East, it is being seized upon and reinforced legislatively by bigoted, authoritarian politicians. You have to ask yourself why such people are obsessed with what goes on in others' bedrooms.
Of course, Eurovision is no stranger to gay culture nor it to the contest. We all remember when Israel's Dana International struck a blow for trans acceptance way, way back in 1998. Her entry was accompanied by talk that it could spark civil war between secular/liberal and orthodox Israelis. I'm not entirely joking. Nor was last night the first time Eurovision has played host to a drag act. Verka Serduchka represented Ukraine back in 2007. It too caused protests, but ostensibly because Serduchka sent up middle-aged peasant women rather than saying anything about sexuality. However, that performance was more pantomime dame than anything else and so was deemed "safe".
Wurst's revolutionary quality lies in being queer. Being queer as fuck. She's an arresting, nay stunning woman, who happens to also be a bearded man in a dress. No fake boobs. No bum padding. Her very figure takes gender boundaries and straddles them in defiance of the conventional rules of drag. Is she a man? Is he a woman? Wurst constantly keeps that question in play and stubbornly refuses to answer it, as if it doesn't matter. In so doing Wurst forces everyone ill at ease with the liquefaction of gender and sexuality to face up to their lingering discomforts and make a choice about what is and what isn't tolerable to them. Increasing numbers are taking the tolerant road, hence the signpost of history is definitely pointing in the direction of acceptance, to a destination where such questions matter no longer.
The fact Wurst's presentation wasn't a barrier to her winning and, in fact, will have contributed toward that victory in a major way sends out a clear progressive message. For the 160m Europeans who tuned in, for those in Belarus, Russia and elsewhere who have to hide their sexuality and gender identities, it shows them a possible image of their own future, that the countries to the west are riding a cultural wave of acceptance that will eventually wash up on their shores too. As painful and frightening things are now, the bigotry Putin and co are egging on are the death spasms of moralities and norms on their way out. There is every chance that after last night, the distance between it and its final resting place has foreshortened.
(NB 1. Co-author creds are due @catherinebuca - some of these ideas are hers).
(NB 2. 'Conchita Wurst' means 'Vagina Sausage')
What is going on with Nintendo? A year on from our last look at the Japanese console and video game manufacturer, things are no different. Sales of their latest machine, the ridiculously-named Wii U are down on 2013's lacklustre performance, and have already been surpassed by the more expensive PlayStation 4 after less than six months on the market. Microsoft's Xbox One is only a million sales behind too. Clearly, something needs to be done and today, company president Satoru Iwata outlined five short-term moves. Interestingly, one of its core strands is public health ...
Okay, so they have a plan. And what better way to say to shareholders "everything is cool, folks" by embroiling themselves in a homophobic shit storm? It centres around Tomodachi Life, a life sim that has done the business for Nintendo's 3DS in Japan. You create an avatar and basically potter around a virtual universe making friendships, striking up relationships and marrying. As the graphics are far beyond the machines of my day, I doubt I'll be buying a copy. But here's the rub. You have complete control over your player character. They are exactly the sort of person you want to create. There is no plot beyond what you and your virtual friends make up. And yet, Nintendo will not let your character have a same sex marriage. You can do it for real in several European countries and US states, but not in a video game the company wants to market in these places.
This isn't the first time a LGBT controversy in video gaming has ignited. It might be better remembered these days for its "controversial" ending, but Bioware's Mass Effect 3 was embroiled in a huge internet conflagration rivalling the in-game war over same-sex relationships. As a roleplaying game you can completely customise your player character, Commander Shepard. If you so wish, as you play out the story over the games you can have relationships with non-player characters. Man/woman, woman/man, (man/woman)/alien - anything goes! Except, in the first two game, gay relationships were out. Oh, if your character was a woman you could have encounters with the mono-sexed Asari - who just so happened to present as blue-skinned space babes. But that wasn't really a lesbian thing, maintained Bioware in their best serious face. Hence the fan community campaigned hard for same sex options to be included in the final instalment of the trilogy. The company dug their heels in - Shepard, whether a woman or a man, was absolutely 100% hetero, they maintained. Same sex relationships weren't appropriate for a action-heavy military sci-fi video game, either. Unfortunately for them, the Dragon Age franchise, another of Bioware's big guns, was a action-heavy fantasy video game. Yet that from the beginning allowed for in-game relationships across the genders. If there were unresolved homophobic issues out there in hardcore gamerland, it didn't effect those all-important sales. The company eventually saw sense and relented.
Nintendo tend to operate in their own bubble and relate to the world as if it's still 1988, the last time they had the Japanese and North American video game markets all sewn up. Clearly the controversy and bad press Bioware got at the time passed the company by, because Nintendo don't appear to have learned from that episode. In their mitigation, Nintendo argue that Tomodachi Life did not have same-sex functionality when it launched in Japan and were just expecting to give it a straight port, if you'd pardon the pun, to other territories. The question then was why a life sim in which every aspect of your character's personality can be chosen wasn't given the option to have relationships with/marry same-sex others? Is Japan overly uptight and Nintendo thought it wouldn't fly with its home video game market? The amount of hentai and "imaginative" anime out there suggests they might have underestimated how open-minded the Japanese consumer is. Was it the case the suits and the developers find homosexuality a bit icky, and so the thought of two superdeformed gaggles of male polygons holding hands was a step too far? Were Nintendo afraid it might tarnish their kid-friendly Disney-of-gaming image? Or did it simply not occur, which, in the early 21st century, is very hard to believe.
None of these are good enough excuses. If you make a life sim without the option for same sex relationships your product, your company is saying you don't find them acceptable. Ironic, considering Nintendo said their game "never intended to make any form of social commentary".
Julie Burchill wrote this. Paris Lees rejoined with this. Burchill (paraphrased): "intersectionality is about scoring points off multiple oppressions". Lees (paraphrased): "intersectionality is about respecting difference". Who's right? Both of them are. Here's a 3,000 word essay making that point too. What often falls by the wayside in discussions around intersectionality is, to put it crudely, what intersectionality is for. It doesn't have to be for anything, of course. If you want it to just be a marker for mutual respect then take it. But for us of a more socialist bent, intersectionality is about political agency. But how does it, if you can pardon the pun, intersect with a socialist political project? Where does it leave class?
Here are some thoughts that deliberately do not address class and capitalism. That's because another post will follow that does.
1. Intersectionality grew out of an oversight. Nay, a failure. Its roots can be found in the so-called New Social Movements of the late 60s and 1970s: feminism/women's liberation, anti-racism/black power, LGBT rights/queer politics. In the context of the USA, it was because the anti-Vietnam War movement and (mostly student-based) New Left replicated the traditional political dominance of white/male/straight. With a little bit of violence to national specificities, in Western Europe it was the failure of labour movements and the working-class based revolutionary politics of the communist parties and the far left to take such matters seriously. At least initially.
2. If anything, "established" radicalism and official socialism/communism were hostile. Labour movements in the 19th century and after the 2nd World War worked to exclude women from the workplace, and by extension install them in the home. Labour movements have an inglorious history of enforcing a colour bar.
3. A rocky road has been travelled. Yet, despite some outstanding battles yet to be won the route New Social Movements, or, Identity Politics, have plotted these last 40 years has seen important milestones reached and passed. Officially speaking, sexism, racism and homophobia are no longer acceptable. In Britain at least an inclusive, civic nationalism is the preferred, sanctified mode of Britishness. Think the London Olympics. Don't think UKIP and the Empire.
4. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have not gone away. They are, instead, more underground than they used to be. Hate crime and hate speech can call the full weight of the law down on a bigot's head. But the case remains that if you're a woman, if you're a member of an ethnic minority, if you're not straight and/or present as the gender you were not assigned since birth, you have to put up with the grind of discrimination, symbolic violence and, occasionally, actual violence. The vitalism of the 'new', third/fourth wave of feminism speaks of the continued salience of sexual discrimination, for example.
5. Social locations are always social relations. What is more, they are negative social relations. Society, or 'the social', will never forget your gendered, racialised, sexualised carcass. It will never let you forget it either. We are not cultural dopes though, we don't dance to the rhythm of abstract, rarified structures - even if it sometimes appears as if that is the case. The social context, the field of power, the frame of networked interactions - call it what you like - it always-already conditions our lived existences. They do not determine it.
6. Disadvantaged social locations are something that is "done" to groups of people. But at the same time, because they are social relations, they can be remade. Subjectification is not the same as subjugation. The commonality of experience among masses of people is a well for the formulation of common grievances, common outlooks, and common objectives. Identity is politicised, and from this basis collective action can (theoretically) proceed.
7. The question immediately arises 'whose experience is being collectivised?' Did the Black Panther Party or the black nationalism of Malcolm X speak of the historic experience of African-American women? Did 1970s 2nd wave feminism in its liberal, socialist and radical iterations take on board the historic experience of African-American women? The answer to both questions was no.
8. As social beings, each of us can be read as a foci of multiple social relations. Some of those relations can, for a number of historic, cultural and socio-structural reasons, work to place ascribed categories of people at a systematic disadvantage. It is possible for one to inhabit more than one of these disadvantaging, disempowering sets of relations. This is the starting point of intersectionality.
9. As disadvantaged social locations cut across one another, must identity politics become 'nominally essentialist' - that is assume certain identity properties and proceed from there without getting bogged down in border disputes vis straight vs lesbian feminism, white vs black feminism, trans-friendly vs cis-only feminism, etc.; disappear into fragmentation and privilege checks; or seek alliances?
10. Each avenue corresponds to established political and cultural ways of doing things. Nominal essentialism, the "speaking for" all women, all black and minority ethnicities, all LGBT people maps on to pressure groups lobbying/campaigning for legislative and institutional change, promoting tolerance through official channels, and shifting attitudes. When it is successful, which tends to be incremental, there is a political/cultural trickle down that can, generally speaking, improve the quality of (a) disadvantaged social relation(s).
11. Nominal essentialist renderings of oppression has also undergone heavy depoliticisation. Gay men, for example, are less a political category and more a marketing demographic: a postmodern lifestyle to be catered for by our consumerist cornucopia.
12. Fragmentation is the pathological outcome of identity politics. It is not the effect of intersectionality. It is its failure. Its root is not so much a purer, more radical form of identity politics (though it can assume such a guise), but rather a political bend toward recognising x, y, z social location (or combinations thereof) as equally valid points of view. It becomes pathological and fragmentary when it is disconnected from politics. Or, rather, becomes a project of individual self-presentation - a project that lends itself well to the emergent narcissistic self. Hence the possibility of politics are closed, leaving behind the emptiness of identity display.
13. As social beings consistently and continuously constituted (and constituting) by interacting, disadvantaging/oppressing social relations, these are not Berlin Walls cutting each other off from each other's experiences. We can empathise. We can put ourselves in each others shoes. Our ability to speak, to understand is founded on intersubjectivity. Hence the possibility of reconciling difference, of building an alliance between multiple positions continually produced by disadvantaging social relations is possible. Especially when the relations that disadvantage simultaneously advantage certain elites. Oppression fragments the oppressed. Oppression homogenises the oppressor.
14. On what basis can an alliance of the oppressed and disadvantaged be founded? A nice idea, or some free-floating project discursively stringing together different flags won't do it. And, in and of itself, the intersectional commonalities shared by women, minority ethnicities, and LGBT people have so far not forged lasting political projects that take all of them on board. Especially when a small number of traditionally oppressed people now find themselves on the advantaged side of the equation.
15. This is where capitalism and class come in.
Following the tragic death of Lucy Meadows, a transgendered teacher who was monstered by the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn in a characteristically vile piece, the paper has released the following statement:
"It is regrettable that this tragic death should now be the subject of an orchestrated twitterstorm, fanned by individuals – including former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell – with agendas to pursue.
"They might do well to consider today's words of media commentator Roy Greenslade: 'Let me begin this posting by urging that people do not rush to judgment... It is important to note that there is no clear link – indeed any link – between what Littlejohn wrote and the death of Lucy Meadows.'
"Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Lucy Meadows."
Hat tip Channel 4 News for that one.
The Mail has a point. We do not know a great deal about the conditions surrounding Ms Meadows' passing, and as a general rule one should never jump to conclusions until all the facts have come to light.
After all, The Daily Mail would never do that.
If it wasn't churning up waters polluted by the most bigoted filth the Tory benches can muster, you could almost sit back, have a nice cup of tea and watch the Conservative Party tear itself apart over gay - or as I prefer to call it - equal marriage. It was almost entertaining to read The Telegraph's forensic job on the havoc it's wreaking upon the party's body politic. Constituency chairs stepping down and resigning, activists going on strike, around 180 Tory MPs set to abstain or vote against ... on the surface it looks like the worst crisis the Tories have faced since Thatcher was ousted.
All this begs the question. If we are to take the protestations of the withering grass roots at face value and equal marriage is driving the activist base away, then why is Dave so determined to pursue such a self-destructive course? Presumably he would like to win in 2015?
I think there are four things going on.
Dave really believes in marriage, whether it's between a woman and a man, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. As rare an instance it may be these days, here we have a party leader acting out of genuine conviction. It's therefore difficult to disagree with Michael Gove(!) who, batting for Dave in Sunday's Mail says "It's wrong to say to gay men and women that their love is less legitimate. It's wrong to say that because of how you love and who you love, you are not entitled to the same rights as others. It's wrong because inequality is wrong." Well said.
But Dave is nothing if not the consummate politician. Equal marriage is much more than the disinterested pursuit of sincerely-held convictions - there are a couple of important political stakes in play. The first, and most obvious, is the attempt to move away from the 'nasty party' image. True, attacks on our poorest and most vulnerable people so millionaires can have a hefty tax cut isn't something I would do if I was overly concerned with cultivating a compassionate conservative image. But Dave is gambling that people really don't care about attacks on social security and "skivers" and that it will all be forgotten in time for 2015 by when, he hopes, the economy will have picked up. So by enthusiastically embracing equal marriage he hopes the Tories can start making inroads into LGBT communities. His aim, no less, is to make the Tories the party that champions same-sex relationships - not the party of Section 28. At the price of the stop-the-world-we-want-to-get-off types who infest the constituency associations, Dave must hope the swing voters lured by the liberal conservatism of his "hug a husky" phase will give him another punt.
The second, and probably the most overlooked aspect of the row is how it can, and is, strengthening his leadership. On the face of it the opposition talked up by the Telegraph looks serious. But, electorally speaking, equal marriage - like Europe - is a second order issue. As has been pointed out, it's not likely to have much of an impact on the Conservatives' performance - and they may, in fact, gain more than is lost. Nevertheless, what we have here is a party leader going against what appear to be the immediate interests of his party. He's caved to backbenchers on Europe and Lords reform, but not this time. With Labour and LibDem backing the legislation (on the whole) Dave will get his way in the teeth of a feral but declining internal opposition. And once they lose the Commons vote tomorrow, the less able they can mount an opposition in the future. Just as victory emboldens an insurgency, defeat can work to demobilise one. With his internal enemies weakened or decamping, the less likely Dave's Irritant Tendency can derail his plans for the remainder of this parliament.
Lastly, and to strike a conspiratorial tone; Europe, equal marriage, they're all rather good for keeping the NHS and the economy out of the headlines.
On a day that demonstrates the thugs of Golden Dawn in Greece aren't necessarily having it all their way; on a damp, cold island off the coast of North West Europe, a beleaguered co-thinker attempts to stir up some controversy:
It's likely the small band of A Very Public Sociologist readers who've returned to the fold post-reboot have a passing familiarity with the case mentioned by Nazi Nick.
There is more than a hint of desperation to Griffin's tweet. It's hard to believe it's been three years since the BNP was something of a power in the land. In the grand scheme of things its two MEPs, London Assembly member, and 50-plus councillors (including threatening concentrations in Barking and Dagenham, and our very own Stoke-on-Trent) didn't really amount to much, politically speaking, but they attracted coverage way beyond those numbers. The BNP fed off anti-immigrant feeling whipped up by mainstream parties and the press, and sparked off panic right through the political spectrum when it appeared they were making inroads into what some now euphemistically term 'marginalised majority communities'. They congealed the logical end point of widespread immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia, legitimated it to a degree, and then pushed the political spectrum even further to the right on these issues. Looking back now, it's a wonder the BNP didn't do even better.
What a difference a few years can make. When the shine had come off the BNP's polished turd, the party found itself losing its membership database twice, wracked by ruinous local splits, subject to persistent allegations of of fraud, on the receiving end of an expensive and protracted court case, two leadership challenges, and, of course, disastrous election results that saw the BNP's council representation down from 50 to just three councillors.
Then there is the small matter of recent events. You may not have heard about it, but the BNP are undergoing what is probably its most damaging and, possibly terminal split. Fascist "elder statesman" and BNP MEP for Yorkshire and Humber Andrew Brons announced his resignation from the BNP just yesterday. I expect the standing he has among the party's dwindling ranks will encourage a number of core cadre to follow him out the exit.
Saddled with an imploding party and haunted by the spectre of continuing electoral irrelevance, Nick Griffin's tweet is an attempt to jumpstart the BNP's fortunes and, perhaps, distract his remaining loyalists from the crisis engulfing his organisation. As the one party that frequently and ostentatiously styles itself as the champion of Christian Britain (though, arguably, the BNP is the party least in tune with Christian values), and with the Islamophobia market currently cornered by the EDL, Griffin's publication of Michael Black and John Morgan's address and subsequent threat will probably see him arrested. The subsequent outrage and comment, of which this post is part, and the prospect of a court appearance might be enough to scoop up a few hundred gullible recruits and several thousand quid in 'defence fund' donations. But it could also help boost his position as the far right's most prominent personality and, in the event of a conviction, might prevent him from running again in 2014 - giving him the stuff from which to fashion a claim to political martyrdom.
With the run of absurd convictions around offensive and tasteless Facebook posts and tweets, it's hard to see how der Fuehrer won't get his wish.
Whatever happens, it will be a while before we truly see the back of Nick Griffin.
There are days I wish Melanie Phillips would act like a proper troll and only sally forth from under the bridge to harass passing goats. But as the Daily Mail columnist you love to hate, Mel wouldn't be doing her job if she didn't cause a shit storm once in a while. And that's what she's gone and done this morning with her latest rant, 'Yes, gays have often been the victims of prejudice. But they now risk becoming the new McCarthyites' (you can read the snappily-titled piece here without having to visit Mail Online).
In her latest broadside against The Permissiveness Undermining Our Nation and Endangering Your Children, Mel uncovers a secret plot hatched by the cunning homosexualists who pull the government's strings. As "part of the ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very concept of normal sexual behaviour" the biggest threat to kids are no longer the perverts hanging round the school gates, but the gay propaganda infiltrating exercise books and course content. Witness the shocking imminent changes to the curriculum:
"In geography, for example, they will be told to consider why homosexuals move from the countryside to cities. In maths, they will be taught statistics through census findings about the number of homosexuals in the population.
In science, they will be directed to animal species such as emperor penguins and sea horses, where the male takes a lead role in raising its young."
Trigonometry exercises illustrated by pink triangles, crafts geared around the production of soft furnishings, French replaced by Polari, and Year Ones not progressing until they've learned how to spell 'tribadism' can only be a fey handclap away. In short, unless we stop this sick filth now our schools will become madrassas for queer fundamentalism. People will stop having babies, Britain as we know it will vanish and this sceptered isle will be open to colonisation by the Allah-worshipping hordes.
In the real world and not the one existing inside Mel's bigoted brain, it is entirely proper the curriculum normalises trans, lesbian, bi and gay folk. The Tories especially have a historical debt to pay as Section 28 was introduced on their watch - a debt Dave himself has acknowledged and apologised for - and any positive moves to making good on that should be welcomed. But despite the massive strides made in gay acceptance legally, culturally, and socially these last 30 years, homophobic bullying remains an unwelcome rite of passage for LGBT and straight kids alike. As this BBC Report from 2007 shows, far from schools being the gay-friendly spaces Mel imagines them to be bullying remains endemic.
Not that Mel and her ilk particularly care. Like the seriously deranged big mouths across The Pond, Mel is a professional right wing provocateur. She knows as well as anyone her career as a columnist and media pundit would be done if she ceased raiding the circa 1981 Monday Club ideological grab bag. She ain't going to shut up as long as there's a buck to be made.
This material interest in continued exposure fits those of Mel's employers as snug as a bug in a rug. A market exists for reflecting back the bigoted prejudices of the angry and the alienated, and is one The Mail has long since cornered. But in Britain it has pioneered the capturing of a new and growing audience interested in right wing news 'n' views: that of the outraged left/liberal/Labourist/Graun/Indy/C4News milieu. DMGT doesn't care what those muesli-eating Marxists and the occasional lefty celeb are tweeting about, just as long as the newest slice of reactionary bilge upsets them enough to drive more people to the website so they can be disgusted and angered, and who in their turn drive more people to the website.
In short what DMGT have is a business model for successfully attracting large numbers of relatively well educated, relatively affluent people who wouldn't ordinarily touch their toxic rag with a pair of hazmat gloves. It's a stroke of genius: exploit your opponents' right-on politics and they will market your putrefying product across their social media networks for you.
Just remember that next time Melanie Phillips says or writes something stupidly bigoted and controversial.
Originally posted on the Labour Representation Committee website. This is from Thierry Schaffauser of Left Front Art and the LRC.
Part of the current homophobic discourse is to portray LGBT people as economically stronger than the “general population”. We’ve heard about the so called “pink pound” and the expression “double income, no kids” which present us in the mainstream media and advertisement industry as a new target market of the consumerist society.
These representations tend to feed the conspiracy theories that describe the “gay lobby” as imposing the “values of a minority” to the defenceless silent majority who continues to raise “hard working families”. Some people continue to think that homosexuality should not be the concern of the working class which has better priorities to defend like opposing the government cuts.
They don’t realise that we are actually as much if not more concerned by the cuts. If some gay men are indeed very powerful and influential, the majority of LGBTQ people are in fact less advantaged economically. It is true that white middle class gay men are often the leaders of the gay movement and indeed more visible because they have more power which allows them being visible. The “pink pound” in a capitalist society allows them buying better acceptance.
However, what about those who are not middle class? Do you think that homosexuality is stranger of the working class? Ask yourself why trade unions are still dominated by straight men. Why is it still so difficult for many to come out among their comrades? The reality is that we do exist but LGBTQ issues are still considered as less serious, less important, a secondary struggle which divert the focus from what really matters. This way of thinking is actually the best way to divide the working class when we should be all united.
It erases our existence and therefore our oppression and our struggles. Moreover, homophobia does not operate in the same way according to your class, gender, race, etc. Homophobia may be less a problem when you are a Minister and have a body guard, but it can be very violent when you are working on the streets as a sex worker and that people see you as an easy target that doesn’t deserve police protection. Lesbians as women don’t benefit the same economic power that gay men when Trans’ people are often excluded from the labour market. Also the HIV epidemic has had a tremendous impact for many gay men in terms of economic disempowerment.
Many people remain silent in their workplace about their identity because they know that in a difficult economic period they may be the first ones to be made redundant. They know that the cuts in their sector will target them more than others. They will have to continue playing the discreet ones, sometimes lying, and listening to all the family stories of their colleagues acquiescing in silent. They will give some money to help a widow colleague with the funerals of the loved husband she lost while nobody said a word when his husband and half his friends died of AIDS a few years earlier.
The cuts will affect the LGBTQ communities more because we are never a priority. The “real families” will always come first, even when we have children too. They will have to save the most important and we know that we’re not. Many LGBT charity organisations are already losing their funding like Galop an organisation helping victims of hate crimes; LGBT youth services which many have already closed, or Broken Rainbow that helps people suffering domestic violence within a same sex couple.
The cuts imposed on students and the rise of tuition fees will obviously have a greater impact on those students who are not supported economically by their family and among them many LGBTQ students are more likely to be in that situation.
Many HIV services and health organisations are also at risk, with a greater lack of means to support people living with HIV and with fewer consultations available for STD’s testing and less prevention campaigns in a critical period when young gay men are currently very vulnerable to HIV infections.
There will be even less funding to investigate hate crimes when they are already underfunded. Yet, the difficult economic period is conducive to higher level of homophobic and transphobic attacks because people are looking for scapegoats for their own problems. The lack of staff in public transports or the cuts in public lighting will also reduce the safety of those who need it the most.
Most schools don’t educate pupils about feminism or LGBT issues despite an obligation to mention them at least for LGBT history month in their programs. If schools have less funding, many teachers will consider that they must focus on the “fundamentals” without wasting time for less important items of the programme. Nonetheless, education is the best way to fight hate crimes committed often by very young people and to reduce the problems of school bullying or the high levels of LGBTQ teenagers’ suicide.
Many LGBTQ people are in need of protection such as asylum seekers. Most of them are denied their rights and deported back to countries where they face persecutions and death. LGBTQ asylum seekers who are only seen as an additional cost will struggle even more to be recognised by the Home office as deserving protection.
The list is long and I probably forget other issues but what is clear is that we will suffer a lot from the cuts. In that struggle, we will need more than ever the support of the Labour movement because the gay movement has for the moment nothing to say about the cuts. However, more and more LGBTQ activists refuse the commercialisation of their pride and sociability places and the de-politicisation of their identities. Some like me use the term “Queer” politically not only to reclaim the insult but to question the normalisation of the gay identity and in particular regarding the issues of class and race.
We are more and more who prefer to invest our energy in the Labour movement because the oppression we suffer is not only about homophobia and that the homophobia we suffer is different to those of white middle class men. New forms of activism such as UK Black Pride, Hackney Pride, Queer mutinies, or the work of LGBTQ trade unionists try to include and analyse the intersection of class, race, sexuality and gender in their struggles. Left Front Art is one of these organisations and we have affiliated to LRC because we want these issues to be part of the progressive Labour agenda.
Guest post from Charlie of All Very Unaverage.
The Conservative MP Claire Perry, representing the good constituency of Devizes, Wiltshire, has suggested the introduction of a Great Porn Filter. This stalwart piece of software would patrol the borders of our great nation, letting in only the most virtuous, the most pure, the most clean of web traffic. With the filter in place Britain might rid itself of the terrible addicition to pornography that has brought it to its knees (so to speak) and which has led to all the problems that we now face: student debt, benefit cuts and snow over our noble runways. Without internet porn Britain would once again be a place that Mary Whitehouse could smile down upon from her heavenly doilie-enhanced throne. It would become, once again, a green and pleasant land.
Ahem.
I'm not going to go into why the "research" supporting Claire Paerry's little crusade is rubbish. Foxsoup did a far better job than I could. But I am going to tell you what the result would be.
The filter is an attempt to censor pornographic imagery from young sexual adults. These dirty, naughty images would enter the country at will, but it would be the task of your ISP to clamp their electronic fists around your home phone line and prevent your household from accessing them. If you did want access to Asian Hot Ass or Mighty Cocks of the Midwest then you would have to phone up your ISP and ask them to remove it.
You would have to beg for porn.
"Hello there, this is Denise, how can I help you?"
"Erm, hello. I'd, er.. like some [mumble] please."
"Some what, sir?"
"Some [mumble] ass."
"Could you say that just a bit louder, sir?" [puts call on speakerphone for entire call centre to hear]
"I JUST WANT SOME HOT ASIAN ASS, ALRIGHT? IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? I JUST WANT SOME PORN! IT'S BEEN 16 HOURS SINCE MY LAST WANK!"
"Just adding that to your account, sir"
Honestly, I feel sorry for Claire Perry's husband. How much porn must he get through in a day that she has thought about bringing in a national ban on porn as the only way to stop him?
But there's a very deadly side to this, as there is to all right-wing authoritarian plans. Because, who defines porn? There is no National Porn Agency. There is no Inspectorate for Sexual Materials. As far as I can tell, the nearest authority we have for defining porn is The Daily Mail. That self-righteous rag is the only place drawing the line in the sand and saying "this is filth", often alongside a full-page reproduction of said filth.
For those of us who do not have the taste to read the right-wing press we have to rely on personal discretion. For me, porn is heavily literal. I get off on stories and poems - yes, that is pretentious - I need to imagine an erotic situation to get off on it. From what I can tell of fixing the computers of my friends their erotic tastes cover a range quite different to mine: from comics to pictures to films to, in one case, 'Allo 'Allo slash fiction.
There are even, y'know, some people who, ha ha ha, get off on pictures of the same sex. Heh heh...
Oh. Shit.
I remember being a 15 year old boy (we'll come to that later). I remember how confusing sexuality was. I remember how fucking difficult it was in those pre-web days to get access to porn. We don't appreciate it now, but once it was hard to get porn. It wasn't just a case of sitting down with a laptop and opening your browser bookmarks. Oh no. In those days you had to go into a newsagent. And browse the top shelf. And pick up a magazine. And walk up to the counter. And turn bright red. And experience the leer of the owner as he put it in a discreet paper bag. And walk out, shamed.
Now imagine that if you're a gay teenager.
It isn't easy being gay in a straight world. As much as we like to think that we're all groovy with gays, that we've got some gay friends, it's still not easy to be an out non-straight adult. It's positively dangerous to be a queer teenager. Can you imagine how utterly terrifying it must be to access gay porn in meatspace when you're discovering that you're not normal, that what you are can get you beaten to death? If you're non-straight, you know how that feels. If you're straight then have a good fucking ponder about it.
But the availability of the internet in the late 90s changed this. Suddenly the world of same-sex genital tittilation was available from the comfort of your own teenage bedroom. You don't have to risk being mocked, or a beating. Or death. Now you could explore your sexuality, discover your tastes, all from the comfort of your masturbation throne.
Claire Perry doesn't want that. In her world, young people don't have a sexuality, or erotic tastes. They're good girls and boys, appropriately attracted to the opposite sex, waiting to marry before they can get any of that nasty, sticky behaviour over with. And certainly not one of those dirty fucking queers. I feel sorry for her children.
And it gets worse. Because, it's the start of the slippery slope. If we start blocking erotic materials "for the children" then what else gets caught up in that censoring dragnet? A lot of things, for certain - sexual health advice. Images of healthy bodies that a worried teen might need to look at ("is my penis meant to look like that?", "Are my breasts meant to be different sizes?"). Sexual health sites fall under the auspices of "porn" for a lot of current parental control software. This is because netnanny software is fundamentally stupid. It doesn't know WHY you or your child are trying to access a site, only that the Scunthorpe council homepage is pornographic (based on SUPER ADVANCE KEYWORD SEARCHING).
Oh, what about abortion advice? Why would nice children ever want to access that information? Better block it! It's not like teenagers are going to get pregnant!
And then there is another group. I give this one special mention, despite its rarity, because I belonged to that group. A group of kids who hated themselves, who were positively terrified of their own bodies, who are desperate to find out why their own flesh has betrayed them. Transgender teens.
Yes, they exist. I hated what I was for nearly all my teenage years., wanting to rip the skin from my body, sobbing myself to sleep at night because I couldn't understand what I was. But then came along the internet. Oh, the internet. It fucking saved me. It gave 18 year old me a view of the world that made me realise that I wasn't alone, that I could do something about the pain that made me want to die.
Claire Perry, and her evil piece of legislation, would take that lifeline away. Oh, maybe not conciously. I doubt she even knows that trans people exist, let alone that there are trans teenagers out there who rely on the internet for vital support. She wouldn't notice as the sites they use to gain crucial advice from are blocked, due to having never-quite-defined "adult materials", as support channels are closed down for "endangering youth". She wouldn't notice as sites all over the net are blocked for containing mention of sex, genitals, puberty and sexuality, when what they are doing is educating a badly unrepresented and unsupported section of society.
She wouldn't notice as another young person slits their wrists in utter desperation.
So fuck you, Claire Perry. Fuck you and your plan to block life-saving "pornography". Fuck you and your plan to block REAL pornography.
Just fucking fuck you.
Normally known for its frothing headlines, The Daily Mail does a nice sideline in sugar-coated bigotry in its 'Femail' pages. Femail concentrates on personal stories, relationships, cosmetics, fashion, celebrity, bunny rabbits and other sexist staples you can expect from "women's" magazines. If the paper proper uses a blunderbuss to blast out its rancid agenda, Femail prefers the quiet drip of conservative arsenic. And yesterday it was trans women who were subject to its subtle poison.
This piece, called 'A Very Peculiar Engagement' is the story of how Charles Kane, a man who transitioned from male to female and back again is now getting married. Ostensibly a story of his and his fiance's complex body image issues (she's a recovering anorexic) Kane uses it as a platform for his opinions about transgenderism. He says:
People who think they are a woman trapped in a male body are, in my opinion, completely deluded. I certainly was. I needed counselling, not a sex-change operation.
And on surgery itself:
Based on my own experiences, I believe sex-change operations should not be allowed, and certainly not on the NHS ... In many ways I see myself a victim of the medical profession.
One word comes to my mind: idiot. Kane is seriously arguing that because he thought transitioning to a woman was a bad mistake therefore everyone else should be denied that opportunity. It seems the desire to change your sex is something akin to a mental illness. Forget the tens of thousands of trans men and women who've transitioned and found it a life-saver (in some cases, literally) - this self-indulgent crap is grist to the mill of bigots, some radical feminists and "anti-essentialists" for whom the idea of fluid and unfixed gender identities are anathema.
Long time readers of The Mail might recognise Kane. Two years ago he appeared in the paper bemoaning his single status. And before then too: I have a clear memory of reading his story around 2004 in the work's canteen. That The Mail have had to use one guy on at least three occasions to call for bans on trans surgery (even if it's "his opinion") just shows how representative he is of trans people at large. A useful antidote to Femail's venom can be found here.
Yesterday the controversial feminist theologian, Mary Daly, died (short obituaries can be read here and here). Describing herself as a "radical elemental feminist", her views have been variously identified with the separatist, essentialist and transphobic wings of radical feminism.
Daly was probably best known outside of her discipline for refusing to admit male students to 'mixed' theology classes at the Jesuit-run Boston College, a course of action that led to her enforced retirement in 1999. Most obituaries over the coming days are likely to focus on this controversy.
I maybe a socialist and committed to women's equality and liberation, but as a man I find Daly's views deeply uncomfortable. And she would not have had it any other way - she was after all committed to writing for women. Why should she go out her way to mollify those she held responsible for perpetuating sexual violence, systematic discrimination and gendered inequalities? On the other hand, the uncompromising positions she assumed always proved problematic for more mainstream feminists, for whom women's liberation is bound up with a host of other progressive movements (not least anti-racism and the labour movement).
The most troubling aspect of Daly's philosophy as far as radical politics are concerned was her essentialism (which she dubbed her quintessentialism), a position that cast all women as stoic sufferers of injustice and all men as misogynists in on a patriarchal conspiracy - a conceptualisation a million miles away from the actually existing, complex and decentered reality of how women's oppression works. Such a position informs lesbian separatism - both in terms of building a feminist movement (independently of not just men, but also heterosexual/bisexual women and women who advocate coalition building, of so-called "malestream" feminism), and, disgracefully, alibis transphobia in the women's movement. In her Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, she apparently refers to trans people as "Frankensteinian" and living in a "contrived and artifactual condition". Daly also supervised Janice Raymond's PhD dissertation. Published as the notoriously transphobic The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male, which in all seriousness contends transwomen are patriarchal agents in the women's movement and whose existence "rapes" women's bodies. Unfortunately, such absurd and reactionary views tend to swill about the feminist blogosphere still, inflaming bitter disputes wherever they rear their ugly heads.
Despite this, it would be a mistake to reject Daly's views outright. In works like The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, Daly flails the promotion and perpetuation of patriarchal norms and values at the heart of Catholic theology. She writes "a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan." She also elaborated a philosophical position not dissimilar to vulgar Marxist accounts that oppose class consciousness to false class consciousness. According to her Wikipedia entry:
She created a dualistic thought-praxis that separates the world into the world of false images that create oppression and the world of communion in true being. She labeled these two areas Foreground and Background respectively. Daly considered the Foreground the realm of patriarchy and the Background the realm of Woman. She argued that the Background is under and behind the surface of the false reality of the Foreground. The Foreground, for Daly, was a distortion of true being, the paternalistic society in which she said most people live. It has no real energy, but drains the “life energy” of women residing in the Background. In her view, the Foreground creates a world of poisons that contaminate natural life. She called the male-centered world of the Foreground necrophilic, hating all living things. In contrast, she conceived of the Background as a place where all living things connect.
Another element to Daly's philosophy is self-actualisation - a celebration of women casting off the shackles of patriarchy and becoming empowered free agents. In an interview with EnlightenNext magazine, she says "... I don't think about men. I really don't care about them. I'm concerned with women's capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy. Not that they've disappeared, but they've been made subliminal. I'm concerned with women enlarging our capacities, actualizing them. So that takes all my energy ... I'm trying to name something that can only be recognized by women who are seizing back our power. But the words have been stolen from us—even though perhaps they were originally our words—they're our words, but they've been reversed and twisted and shrunken. I see myself as a pirate, plundering and smuggling back to women that which has been stolen from us." You get a sense of this from her own short biography and statements like "courage is like -- it's a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It's like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging." Judging by the comments left on her obituaries, this part of her philosophy has been a positive influence on the lives of some of her readers.
The legacy Daly bequeaths feminism is more complicated and mixed than an assessment based solely on her provocative position-taking.
