Lucky White Girl

The problem with humans

If you had to narrow it down, the problem with human beings is this: we are notoriously short-sighted in our thinking.  We just can't think in large enough spans of time.  Ask us to think about any given concept over the span of oh, say, 50 years from now is a stretch.  100 is really asking a lot.  500?  Forget it.  At the same time our technological know-how has sky-rocketed so now we can do things, design things, build things, implement things --BIG things-- that certainly have those sorts of life-spans with the potential to still be affecting the world far off in the future. A friend of mine adds, "we can also break things, move things, change things on a big/long scale. Mountaintops.  Underwater background noise.  The ozone layer. Bazillions of barrels of oil."

And nuclear waste. Know what the half life of uranium 235 (the stuff in spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors) is? 704 million years. Here's a good fact sheet on it from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.  Know how many nuclear reactors the world has?  Over 400 in operation. 

What do we going to do with all this stuff?  According to Environment Canada, “true walkaway disposal methods are unlikely to be possible, given the long time periods (a minimum of 250,000 years) for which the longer-lived radionuclides would have to be isolated from the soil, air, and water." Source: Canada vs. the OECD: An Environmental Comparison.  Lord, have mercy!

All this I've said before. But another aspect of it struck me the other day.  George Lakoff --you know that guy who's so good at explaining the differences in how liberals and conservatives think and wrote that book, Don't think of an Elephant-- recently wrote a guest post on 538.com.  It's a great post, you should go read the whole thing; he's talking about "seven crucial intellectual moves that [he] believe[s] are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute" but for now check out #6: systemic causation and systemic risk.  He says:

Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences

They don't think about systemic causes (if they did, they'd be called "liberals") but what are the two most pressing problems facing our generation right now?  The global economic meltdown and global warming!   These things are systemic.  You can't think of them as a product of any one process; by their very nature they are systemic problems.  Lakoff says this causes some serious conundrums for conservatives but there's also this: what if --just what if-- having to deal with these two huge, systemic problems gets us humans to finally start thinking about the consequences of our actions in a larger time frame?  What if these two crises fundamentally change the way we think?  Wow!  How cool would that be?  That is, if we survive.

If I ran the world!

If I ran the world I'd make citizenship not a lottery based on where one was born but instead something everyone had to earn.  It'd work like this: the country you worked hardest to be a part of was the country you belonged to.  Then, people who walk for days across mountains and deserts, suffering extreme hardship and nearly dying along the way would earn a thousand times over the right to vote in their chosen country.  Literally, they'd earn say, a thousand votes. 

Winning the birthright lottery and getting yourself born in a particular country would earn just one vote. 

People already in their country of choice could earn more votes and higher citizenship levels by doing various things such as contributing in certain ways to one's community.  Helping others get citizenship points would earn the most votes of all.  You'd lose citizenship points/votes if you killed people who chose citizenship in other countries.

Citizenship.  It's not a right; it's a privilege!

Were the Colombian hostages ransomed, not rescued?

Were the hostages in Colombia really ransomed?  Swiss public radio is reporting that the FARC were paid millions for their release.  In other words, that wasn't a rescue, it was a ransom.  If true this would be really interesting. 

The rescue version of the story, is believable, even if unusual.  The Colombian army doesn't normally opt for non-violent methods in their rescue attempts (their rescue attempts usually involve lots of shooting and the hostages usually end up dead which is why kidnapped people in Colombia almost always ask NOT to be rescued!).   But a whole new modus operandi for the military is not unthinkable, especially since despite unprecedented new international support from Venezuela and Ecuador, the FARC seems quite weak these days and have been suffering some setbacks lately.  With the death of long-time leader Manuel Marulanda (aka Tirofijo, Sureshot) some say the oldest guerrilla group in the country is in decline.  I could see some commanders fucking up like this and would expect to find that those deemed culpable by the FARC higher-ups will pay a very dear price for it, if they haven't already.

But the theory that this wasn't a happy confluence of luck and an unusual change of heart by the government, is certainly not too much of a stretch.  If the U.S. --maybe under pressure from France?-- had a part in paying a ransom they would certainly not want to admit as much (because you know, we don't negotiate with terrorists!)  But why would the U.S. who let these guys languish in the jungle nearly forgotten for so long, suddenly want them back enough to pay millions?  Even if they were CIA (click here to read about who they were and what they were doing down there), they were just doing grunt work (spraying the Colombian countryside with highly toxic insecticide as part of an ineffective --not to mention immoral-- strategy to combat the cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived) and didn't seem to be high enough up the hierarchy to merit much concern until now. 

France, however, has been consistently concerned with the welfare of the more high profile Ingrid Betancourt and French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to make it a priority of his administration to free her.  See this statement he made a year ago about it.  I don't know enough about US-French relationships to know how much sway the French could've had to get the US to go along with this plan, but maybe it was primarily a French affair and only required getting us to not stand in the way. 

And here's another thing I wondered about too:

French media have also raised questions about Ms Betancourt’s relatively healthy appearance after her release, compared with the gaunt and haggard look of her last video from captivity. French state radio suggested the hostages may have been given food and medicine to return them to health before their release. There was no suggestion that the hostages knew they were to be released.

Dominique Moisi, one of France's leading foreign policy experts, said that it was “probable” that the Farc had been paid money as part of the "infiltration" of their command. “They were bought in order to turn them around, like Mafia chiefs," he said on French state television, as Ms Betancourt's plane was taxiing up to the terminal in Paris.

The more I think about it, the more I find the ransom version of the story more credible.  For what it's worth, I don't know how much it matters. The hostages are free and that's good.  Uribe's reaping the benefits of soaring popularity and that's not-so-good.  And some FARC commanders just got a whole lot richer.  Which, even minus possible (likely?) corruption, probably doesn't matter all that much.  $20 million isn't all that much to fight a war with.  In fact, I wonder if the fact that they let go of their biggest bargaining chips a further sign of weakness/desperation.  Even with this new revelation, things are not looking good for them.

Other blog reactions:
PhoenixWoman
WhiteLight/BlackLight

Big ol' messy world

You know the opening scene in Blue Velvet where you see the beautiful idyllic scene of the "typical" middle class family in front of their house with the beautiful yard and then the man watering the grass has a heart attack and dies and the camera follows the arc of the water from the hose down to the grass and then into the grass and underneath the grass and you start to see all the stuff that's going on beneath the surface?

Some of you were wondering how long it'd be until I used that analogy to talk about DC!

I know it's kind of a cliche but I have two observations: one, today it dawned on me that it's not just a cliche, it's really true --I saw it! and two, it's a little more complicated than that.

Everyone knows the complicated messy underbelly of the city is there but I think people pretty much fall into one of the following two camps: those who think you should pretend it's not and those who are okay with it.  They're even (like me), more than okay with it, they relish it.  They like the complicatedness.  They like messiness.  That's the humanity of it.  Blurry lines may lead to much uncertainty and vulnerability but that's a delicious part of being human and it would be with much resistance that I get dragged over to the other side where I can neatly compartmentalize my life and pretend --and forget I'm pretending-- that it's all just an illusion.

"A melancholy that's a first cousin to loneliness"

Sometimes you run across something so well-written it makes you really appreciate the art of writing.  I don't know if it's because it's the holidays and I have time to notice or if it's the subject matter and my desire to learn more about my new city or if it's the author's tendency to, like me, be fascinated both the differences and the connections between people in this highly disparate world. 

Whatever it is, this article made me think the author wields language like a marionette.  You don't see that very often in a mainstream newspaper.  This is from the Washington Post Magazine.  It's about Pennsylvania Ave, one of the few streets I know so far because it's not too far from where I live.  It's an odd street, as they say, easy to get lost on.  The author describes it as emblematic of something uniquely "American":

It feels accidental, with its random grandeur, ironies and banality. Sometimes there's a melancholy that's a first cousin to loneliness, which is one of the conditions of being an American. It seems to harbor an on-going scheme for self-improvement, another American condition.

The Southeast end is the sort of America that tourists come from. The Northwest end is where tourists go to. One avenue, many paradoxes, many echoes.

(I'm never sure what to think when people talk about "Americans" or the "American condition"... Is there such a thing?  Do we have an "American condition"?  I know it's the warm fuzzy thing to say yes, that despite our differences and inequalities, there is something fundamental that we all share.  But every time I try to pin it down it seems it cannot be separated from what anyone anywhere in the world would also have experienced during their time on this planet.  Maybe that's true, but still, living in the world's only remaining super power has to have some kind of effect on those humans lucky (or unlucky depending on your point of view) to be born in it don't you think?   hmmm....)

Anyway, it was just a particularly nice piece --e.g. "a melancholy that's a first cousin to loneliness"!  I never would've written that such a phrase!  Just thought I'd share it with you language lovers out there.

Effects of postmodern philosophy pervasive in everyday life

I was listening to part of a radio program on NPR today (I think it was Talk of the Nation's Science Friday) and the show was about cognitive dissonance.  You know the idea that when you hold two conflicting beliefs in your head at the same time that this causes internal conflict and your mind does all sorts of things (such as coming up with "excuses" they said, and "justifications") to ease your conscience about being a hypocrit? 

So, in the beginning of the show, as they were defining what cognitive dissonance is, they used an example: You think you are a good, honest, virtuous person yet you "cheat" on your taxes.  You might experience some cognitive dissonance about this.  "Oh I paid more than I should have last year" or "I don't like what they do with my money anyway".  Stop.  Right there.  Hold on now, let's examine that.  What's the difference between an "excuse" or a "justification" and critical thought then?  Seems like the distinction is just subjective to me.  What if you are a citizen of Germany during the 1930s and you really do have a pretty good justification for not liking what your government was doing with your tax money?

So then it hit me.  Is that a problem with cognitive dissonance theory?  Or just a problem with the way they explained it?  Because the way they explained it, the theory sounds like it assumes that there exists out there an "objective, absolute" truth or morality of some sort or another (e.g. paying one's taxes) and if your behavior is in conflict with that universal absolute truth you're gonna have problems.

But what if you don't believe in universal, absolute truths?  Does that mean you have to throw out the cognitive dissonance theories?

It made me think that a postmodernist view really complicates a lot of things you'd never even think of.

Peace-making in Iraq: some musings

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said on Tuesday that Iraq is "a problem of the whole world” but stopped short of saying the UN should take over the US mess in that country.  Zalmay Khalilzad, former US Ambassador to Iraq, however is not so reticicent.  He has an editorial in the NY Times today saying yes, definitely the UN should take over.  What else can we do?

This is it.  This is how the US is gonna finally get out of Iraq.  Pretty soon Bush will start dropping hints here and there and his advisors and speechwriters will try to make it seem like this was their plan all along, the logical conclusion of their original impeccable argument for the invasion and occupation of a sovereign foreign country.

The reality is that ever since the UN refused to endorse the Iraq venture in the first place, the US was hoping just to ignore the international organization into oblivion.  Make them irrelevant.  Except for when we needed them to legitimize our puppet government there.  Then they could get involved.  But not too much.  The UN, for its part, has reciprocated and tried to steer clear of the whole mess.  No one wants to be associated with an immoral and illegal colonialist war on the part of the world's only remaining super power.

Now, after so much in Iraq has literally blown up in our faces, the UN might be our only way out.   Doesn't the irony of that just kill you??

Personally, I think sending the UN in is, maybe, less than ideal.  It might not be their fault, but they're not very strong and sometimes they are a tool of the US which limits their legitimacy.  It's just that it seems there may be no other options really. 

But wait, I wonder about something else though.  This is really crazy but hear me out.  One of the reasons the first Gulf War was "successful" was because so many Middle Eastern countries supported it.  They saw Saddam as a threat (and at that time he actually was.  Grown strong on US support during his war with Iran, he was not at all the embattled leader weakened by ten years of harsh economic sanctions that we found when we invaded the country in 2003 --though one has to wonder how much of a threat he was even then, after the Iran-Iraq war that lasted what? ten years?).  If a coalition peacekeeping force of Muslim countries in the Middle East were sent in instead, I wonder what the outcome would be?

I don't know enough about the region to hazard a guess to this question.  Would various countries try to influence the outcome to their own benefit?  Sure, that's only rational.  But could it be democratic and mutually beneficial to Iraqis and the rest of the region, even if --I imagine-- it wouldn't be at all in the U.S. interest and we would probably officially oppose such an idea.  (We probably would like to hang on to our hegemony).  I don't know.  But I do know who to ask: Dr. Juan Cole, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan!

Dear Professor Cole,
I read Zalmay Khalilzad's editorial in the NY Times today saying that the US supports letting the United Nations try to clean up our mess in Iraq.  Leaving aside the irony of that idea when we've ignored them ever since they didn't support the invasion in the first place, I have several questions for you.  One, do you think the U.N. would do it?  If so, do you think it would work, and how would a UN peacekeeping force be received in the country?  And three, most importantly, what if it were NOT the UN but rather some kind of coalition of Muslim countries in the Middle East?  Is anyone that you know of exploring or suggesting such an idea?  What do you think of it?

Thanks for your time in responding and sharing your views about this and for your information, I have posted this on my blog, www.luckywhitegirl.com, along with a note saying that I would ask for your input.  I'd like permission to either publish your answer there or link to a post on your blog that would answer this question.

thanks,
barb howe
gainesville, florida

His answer

Hi, Barb.  It seems likely the US will need to depend on the UN increasingly as it withdraws.  But Iraq is way beyond UN capabilities and would strain the organization's resources.  Cambodia is the last time it tried something like this 

cheers  Juan

I'm disappointed that he didn't say anything about the idea of a regional peacekeeping force going in.  Why not?  I know it sounds naive (I was anticipating a snarky comment by someone saying as much) but I still think it's an idea worth looking into.  First, let's not call it a "muslim peacekeeping force" --that would suggest it'd be based on religion and I don't mean that.  I mean a regional peacekeeping force, made up of countries in the region: Iran (according to some already there), Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait (!!), the UAE, Syria, Lebanon (don't laugh)... well, okay some of these countries don't get along so well themselves (and can you imagine how well having Kuwait in there would go over?).... but the point is that you'd think one would want to inject some independence (i.e. autonomy from the US) into the process and if the U.N. is not independent enough who else would be?  Iran.  Jordan, Egypt, the Saudis and Kuwait are all US allies, Syria I don't know and Lebanon depends on if they are recovered enough from last year's war.  Sigh.

I admit I'm just thinking out loud now.  You're right.  This wouldn't work.  It's gotta be the UN then.  Who else is there?  OPEC?  (that was a joke)... Maybe it'd be easier to concentrate on how to make the UN better suited for the task.  The US should be forbidden to have any vote on the matter at all.  Maybe new rules could be written for the Security Council to say that in this particular case the US must step aside in the interests of humanity (I think the Security Council should be abolished completely. It's elitest.  The General Assembly is where all hope for peace and justice lies.  But as that's about as likely as a tranquil night in Baghdad.  For now it's enough to hope that maybe we could just get this one concession?)

So the UN sends in a peacekeeping force made up of countries agreed upon by all parties as being as objective and neutral as possible.  And the US sits down and shuts up.  After impeaching and then apologizing for our asshole president, of course.  Oh and financing the lion's share of the cost of the mission.  Cause we caused the mess in the first place. It's only fair.  So there ya go.  Peace in the Middle East!  Easy as pie!  lol....

 

Tea is better than water! says new "study" by Tea Companies

Ok first of all, let me say that I like tea and am trying to drink more of it, but it's not the subject of this article that bothers me so much as the format and whole premise behind the story.  Read the last sentence.  I think we should just say this: if a "study" was funded by a company with a clear interest in the result of the study then it's not a STUDY at all, it's a Public Relations promo.  Denigrates the whole idea of research, if you ask me.

And why should they get free advertising simply for framing it within the format of a news story?  You'd think the BBC would be smarter than this.  C'mon you're giving something away for free that you should be charging them for (ad space).  You're losing money on this deal while also contributing to the blurring of the line between news and advertising.  Shame on you.  I expect better of the BBC (but unfortunately I think this is quite common for them and many other news outlets).

Newsflash: New Study by PR industry says making ads appear like hard news increases profits! (duh!)

On language and society

The survey project is on hold until I get more frequent access to internet service.  In the meantime here are some thoughts on language and society because my friend Paul V sent me a link to this page about gender-neutral language and asked what I thought about it. 

I think that it's interesting because language is not a static thing (and thank goodness we don't have a regulatory body for the English language like I hear they have in France for French because then it'd really be a radical concept to conceive of language as something immensely democratic).  Language seems to be the ultimate democratic movement.  It is truly of the people and by the people.  It's always in flux and it reflects the society which created it.  Which makes sense until you think about how language shapes thought as well --as any good constructivist will tell you.  And then you get to realize that if society creates language then language equally creates society as well; they are mutually constitutive.  So it's a chicken and egg argument.

Which leads to the short answer: I think we will have a gender-neutral language when we have a gender-neutral society and vice versa.

So is it "worth it" to try to promote the use of gender neutral terms?  Honestly I don't really know.  I think it can't hurt.  I do it in some situations.  I say "they" a lot for a non-specific unknown person, even if that person is singular and not plural.  Technically it's currently incorrect grammatically but it didn't used to be a few hundred years ago.  (I learned that in a linguistics class and I'll try to get a citation for it soon).  That one change solves like 99% of everyday non-gender-neutral language I've found.  Letter carrier instead of mailman is another one I've used.

When I most run into non-gender-neutral language is in church.  They sing the doxology in the Mennonite church I go to.  I say "Creator, Son and Holy Ghost" instead of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" in the last line.  And I change the Hail Mary slightly when I pray the rosary (yes, I do that sometimes): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you AND ALL women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus".  I think the orthodox version says blessed are you AMONG women.

My linguistics professor used to talk about prescriptive grammarians versus descriptive grammarians, the latter being those who describe the way people talk and the former being those who try to get people to talk a certain way.  She said prescriptive grammarians are kinda out of vogue right now and haven't been very successful in getting the unruly masses to "talk right".  Language evolves naturally; it's really hard to direct it.  With that in mind, I might argue that putting one's efforts into creating a feminist society is just as if not more useful than trying to get people to talk a certain way or use feminist or gender-neutral words.  But it's also nice to help things along a bit if you can.  But that's just my opinion.

Survey says!

I remember one time, not long after George Jr. stole the 2000 election (or maybe it was after he was elected in 2004) I was despairing about the state of the world and what would become of it with such a man put in charge of the most powerful country on the planet and a friend of mine said, "I remember when Reagan was elected we felt the same way".  Really, I said, what did you do? I asked him.  "We got through it".  Just that.  We got through it.  And I felt better.  I began to see that this wasn't the first time something absolutely horrible had happened.  Terrible things have happened before and people get through it.  Some individuals might give up, but social change, collective action does not stop.

Now the end of the reign of Bush is within sight.  I thought this day would never come.  His poll numbers are in the pits; for the first time in my life the majority of the US population appear to be against war (I just wish they coulda figured it out sooner; woulda saved so many lives).  I went to an anti-war vigil a few weeks ago and it was nice to be on the winning side for a change.  Most passersby supported us.

We got through it.  Two terms the worst president in US history (thanks bin Laden for making the second term possible!) and we got through it.

This is project is still in its formative stages, so nothing's set in stone yet.  The idea is to talk to a bunch of activists, especially older people or people who've been active for many years and collect their stories about how they got to where they are today, what they've learned over the years and what keeps them going through difficult times.  Because we could use that kind of long-term perspective.

So I've interviewed five people so far.  They're sorta like my trial run --you know the practice interviews you do while still working out the kinks-- but I've gotten such good stuff tonight I really want to use it somehow.  You might get a transcript here or at least some excerpts.

I've got about five or six questions depending on how the interview was going and the interviews take about 5-10 minutes.

I recorded the interviews on a digital tape recorder.

The Questions:

1.) If you'd like, you can state your name and maybe your age.
2.) Where are you from?
3.) What do you do?
4.) How long have you done it?
5.) What was the defining moment or moments in your life when you felt like you really understood the world in a way you hadn't before?  How did it change you or what was your response to this shift in perspective?
6.) From your own personal experience being a political activist, working for political change, what was the most unexpected thing that you learned?
7.)  What's your take on the world now?
8.)  What would you say to young activists today to help them get through difficult times?

I think I'd like to change number 6 to this:

"From your own personal experience working for political change, what was the most surprising thing that you discovered about the process of working in an organized movement?"

That should yield some interesting responses!  I can't wait to ask people that one!

Maybe I'll post my own answers to the questions tomorrow so watch this space and --please-- if anyone out there reading this wants to contribute feel free to put your answers in the comment section below.

Substandard housing makes me mad

This makes me mad.  North Central Florida is filled with many migrant farmworkers, many of whom are illegal and all of whom are extremely poor and vulnerable.  And you have assholes like this who prey on them:

"[Pierson Town Council] Chairman [Samuel] Bennett has been cited for persistent violations of state law during the past 15 years. His mobile homes, rented to farmworkers and inspected under the less-stringent state law governing all mobile home parks, have been cited for infractions ranging from raw sewage flowing around the mobile homes and exposed electrical wires to roach infestations, according to Volusia County Health Department records. He has never paid a fine, records show." (Daytona Beach News-Journal).

Sounds like Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life.

What we need is a Bailey Building and Loan to provide decent, safe, affordable housing for people.  What is a building and loan?  Why don't we have things like this today?  Or do we?... hmmm... a Google search for a CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) revealed this from wikipedia:

"A CDFI may take one of several different forms: community development bank, community development credit union, community development loan fund (including microloan funds), or community development venture capital company.

One of the best illustrations of a CDFI is provided by the film, It's a Wonderful Life. The Bailey Brothers Building & Loan Association is shown as a vital source of financial services and loans to the working class and immigrants in Bedford Falls, helping them to graduate from being renters of Mr. Potter's slums to homeowners themselves."

I wonder if something like this exists in North Central Florida. 

Citizens are activists are citizens.

I was reading the last book of the semester this past week and having trouble getting into it for some reason even though it was a book called "Transnational Protest and Global Activism" and it was about the global justice movement.  (It even called it that "the global justice movement" not the "anti-globalization movement" which I appreciated immensely.  That "anti-globalization" term irks me to no end.  I think because it so effectively obscures both the phenomena and the popular reactions against it that it's hard to have a coherent debate about it!)

Anyway, it was a collection of essays by these various sorts of scholars who were all trying to understand/analyze/explain the (relatively) recent manifestations of the global justice movements (Seattle in '99, Prague, Cancun, Miami etc.).  Mostly it was pretty dull reading for my taste.  They didn't really tell me anything I didn't know and other than feeling a little weird for being (or having been) part of the social phenomena they were studying I didn't find the book useful at all. 

Now it's not readily apparent that the term "activist" is problematic.  I used to call myself an activist.  No big deal.  But reading this book and its descriptions of these sorts of people known as activists got me thinking.  Even though the authors were (relatively) sympathetic, they were unwittingly reproducing a conservative framework by using the terms and definitions they used, which were terms and definitions taken from the social movements literature.

To explain, we can examine volume editor Donatella della Porta’s definition of social movements as “composed of networks of groups and activists, with an emerging identity, involved in conflictual issues, using mainly unconventional forms of participation” (177) beginning with the term “activist”, which presumably refers to people who take political action.  Democracies theoretically are based upon political participation by the masses; they require such participation or they cease to be democracies.  Activists then, are citizens who participate in the democratic process.   Anyone who at least goes to the polls on election day is an “activist”.  The inclusion of the phrase  “involved in conflictual issues” is redundant.  Examining and debating issues is the job of the citizenry which is just another way of saying (again) that they are politically active, (not to mention that the term “conflictual” has negative connotations).

But she goes further to say “unconventional forms of participation”.  That creates a distinction between “activist” and “citizen”.  Activists aren’t just politically active they are “unconventionally” so.  But who decides what is a “conventional” way of being politically active and what is an “unconventional” way?  Is letter-writing unconventional?  How about organizing a sit-in?   Today's unconventional is tomorrow's convention.  It is irrelevant whether a mode of political participation is conventional or unconventional.  It’s all political phenomena.

The separation of the adjective “active” from the concept of “citizen” is political.  One is a passive noun with connotations of obedience, moderation and responsibility.  The other is active, with connotations of abnormality, aggression (or at least assertiveness), excess and irresponsibility.  Della Porta’s definition including the use of “unconventional forms of participation” reinforces this impression and privileges some forms of political action over others.  This is a mistake.  There's no empirical evidence to justify doing this.  It's purely arbitrary and it's immensely disempowering to divorce the notion of action from the concept of citizenship.  It's inherently undemocratic.

In contrast, if we look at understanding the popular uprisings against neoliberal economic globalization and its effects in terms of democratic participation on a global level, there are fewer conundrums to try to figure out.  It’s not hierarchical and organized because we wouldn’t expect the random reactions of a democratic populace to be hierarchical and organized.  If the people speak and act in a relatively unified way it’s not necessarily because there is a “social movement” but because they have similar interests --in this case, because all are hurt in some way by the globalization of capitalism.  So of course there are New York feminists in league with unionists in Michigan in league with environmentalists in Germany in league with campesinos in Chiapas.  They are all together not because they've suddenly figured out a new way to organize a global movement but because they are all are responding to the multi-faceted face of neoliberal economic liberalization (global capitalism).

In other words, globalized capitalism contains the seed of its own destruction and this is it!

So is this just some purely academic debate?  Who cares what a bunch of academics think?  What does this mean for us, for regular old people?  It means we have to normalize dissent.  We have to --by our own language-- bring action back into the concept of citizenry.  In a participatory democracy citizenship is inherently active!

We who take political action are not activists.  We are citizens.  We are not radicals disillusioned with "conventional" means of protest (voting) driven to politics by other means (street protests).  We are citizens doing exactly what citizens are supposed to do and whatever tool of political action we choose to use in a given situation (vote, write letters, organize a sit-in or commit civil disobedience, even stage an overthrow of the government) doesn't matter.  Political action is political action and human beings have used all sorts of means over the years; it's all political.  Doesn't mean there can't be disputes over which tactic is appropriate at any given time in any given situation.  Morality and strategical questions will come into consideration with each one.  But to make a distinction, to privilege some forms of political action over others --or worse to separate the connotation of action from the concept of citizen-- is erroneous, inaccurate and undemocratic.

the view from here: a social theory of relativity

So once again I have two hours to kill until my next interview.   I sit down on a little park bench and a teenage boy who lives in one of the houses I tried to interview at, comes up.  (I say tried, they were another family who had to be replaced eventually).  I noticed when I first met him at his house that he was very odd but I couldn't put my finger on why exactly.  He was sorta always grinning and at first I thought he was just being sorta the cocky teenager, laughing at my accent and what I was doing (trying to convince them to let me interview them).  He'd never met a gringa and wow I spoke English and that's so wild!  Imaginate!  Still.  He was a little over the top.

Anyway yesterday he came up and sat down with me and we had a long conversation and started ask ing me a million questions like what was it I was doing again and what was a non-profit organization and what was it like in the US? and did I live in New Jersey? And had I ever smoked marijuana? He's on some kind of pills but he doesn't like them but he takes them because the doctor said to and what kind of music do I like he likes rap and reggae and is the US very developed do they have lots of things there and why didn't I like that word developed, he meant advanced, was the US very advanced and why didn't I like that word either and did I have a boyfriend and why wasn't I married yet and he just broke up with his girlfriend why because of lack of communication and how old was I and no way could I be thirty years old I look like I'm in my twenties and I must have lots of experience for being thirty and really am I really thirty do I take a lot of care of my skin and could he have my phone number?

Later his mom passed by and I walked with her a bit.  It seems he does have some kind of mental illness.  (I didn't ask, she offered).  I said I was sorry.

But another part of the conversation involved an description of racism in the US.  Remember he said he liked rap and reggae?  So he heard the n-word (which I'm not typing or I'll get even more racist Google searches leading to this blog) and so he wanted to know what the word meant.  I said it was very complicated and that what it means depends on who's using it and how.  He really didn't get that, I think, so I tried to explain the history of the word to the best of my knowledge but I didn't get very far because he kept cutting me off.  Then he asked me something that surprised me a bit but it requires some explanation. 

In Spanish, you might know that people use words that describe physical appearance a lot.  Gordita (chubby -femenine diminutive), flaco (skinny -masculine), mono (light-skinned sorta, or pale or sometimes "cute"), morenito (dark skinned -masculine diminutive), including negro or negrito.  It's not rude to do this as far as I can tell -calling someone gordita, for example- it's like a term of affection sorta.  But being a gringa it's hard for me not to feel awkward using these terms and so I tend to avoid them.  (There are lots of words like this I think.  Some things just sound funny coming from a foreign mouth so best to stick to the rules more or less)

Anyway, in this case, though, I did use the term los negros together with afro-americanos because I didn't know if he'd understand me [insert background info here: Chile, by the way, is very homogenenous supposedly, not like Colombia for example where there's tons of people from African-Carribean descent because of the slave trade.  In Chile people are mostly of mixed European indigenous descent if you don't count the immigrant populations.  They are also have their racism, though it differs from our version of racism in the US.  Here, the main minority group that's discriminated against are indians.  In fact that's the exception to the above examples of describing someone by the physical characteristics.  Calling someone an indian, or indio is unfortunately an insult, like in many Latin American countries.  Also, someone here explained to me that "indigenous" is not far removed from "indian" so don't use that either.  I used that term, indigenous populations but he said not to.  Better to use the term "original peoples".  So anyway, there's lots of racism against anyone with darker shades of skin but there's very few black people.  I only saw one black person here and he was probably a gringo too.  By the way, there's also neo-nazi groups here who regularly appear in the news.  So all that is to explain that it's likely this kid had never seen a black person in his small town.  Which leads to his question].  Who are the black people?  Us? he asked.  Not really, I explain, the people whose ancestors came from Africa as slaves.  And there's lots of racism in the US? he asked. Yes, we have a long history and many problems ... and the conversation whirrled on.

All this is just to say it's interesting to find oneself asked to describe these things to someone within a different system.  It's an interesting experience.  Distance both distorts and clarifies.  It's like the description I just wrote of Chile, which is of course the perception of a gringa, someone from the outside.  It's different from what someone from here would write.  I don't think it's wrong to talk about terms or situations that are not our own, we just have to be aware of 1.) the power imbalance within the history of white people doing that (describing and interpretting other people's cultures) and 2.)remember that a description is not just a description, it's a description from a certain perspective, a certain point of view.  And that that perspective, that point of view changes the way the thing looks.  Call it the social theory of relativity. 

Or something like that.

The terms of the debate

One day in my fem theory class we were reading an anthology called The Fire this Time: Young activists and the new feminism.  It's a good book and I recommend it but it raised some questions.  The editors wrote about wanting to remake feminism into something newer and sexier to appeal to the younger generation.  They said they didn't even want to use the word feminism anymore, opting for something like "third wavers" or something.  (I'd quote the book but I already returned it to the library).  So we began to discuss that idea in class, whether that was a good strategy and what some of the implications of it might be.

At first I thought, fine, call it whatever you like, as long as it resists oppressions.  I had just read an editorial on a progressive website by a young faith-based activist who was going to drop the "Christian" label because it has been so co-opted by the religious right she felt it no longer described her Christ-centered, empire-opposing position from which her activism was based.  Ok, I said, if using a particular word causes you to have to engage in paragraphs of explanation, then fine, for the sake of brevity, use something else.  Language is descriptive, based upon commonly understood meanings but it's also dymanic, meaning those meanings change.  Contrary to popular belief, my old linguistics prof would argue, the dictionary is not the final arbiter of meaning; people are.   If everyone agrees that X means Y then hey, X=Y despite what the grammarians say.

But my fem theory prof had an entirely different take on it and I've not only changed my position, I just argued it on a listserv I'm involved in.  Because I've recently rethought this, I'd like to share some of the arguments I presented against ceding loaded terms and for reclaiming "loaded" words, whatever they may be.

The listserv debate was over the name of a new group of progressive Floridia activists.  Several suggestions for the name of the new group were made including Florida Progressive Voice (or Voices), Florida Progressive Coalition and Florida Progressive Union.  I voted for the last, because I thought it was short, direct and classy.  But some people thought it was both misleading and off-putting to a significant segment of the population for including the term "union".  In light of my recent rethinking of these sorts of things, this now bothers me.  Below are some common arguments for ceding loaded terms and my (new) responses to them.

• We dont' want to use this word because we want to appeal to as large a segment of society as possible.

I think this is the wrong approach.  I don't want to agree with popular culture; I want to change it.  Popular culture most of the time disgusts me.  Our society is racist, sexist, classist, homophobic and profoundly inegalitarian.  These are things I want to change; not things I want to agree with, accomodate or appeal to.  I have enough faith in humanity to believe that if people see other people challenging society's -isms, they will be inspired to join in, not put off by a superficial reading of a word.  People --all people-- have an innate love for justice, compassion and loving kindness and are attracted to such things no matter what moniker they go by.  We don't have to accept that the conservatives have made words such as "union" and "feminism" unsavory. 

I don't like to cede the terms of the debate to the conservatives.  When we do that we restrict the realm of thinkable thought and certain things fall outside the realm of the possible, like labor unions, in this example. Language is thought; thought is language.  The two are so intertwined that a debate about language is a debate about thought.  When we give up the use of a particular word, we are implicitly recognizing the unsavory-ness of it.  To do that is to agree that it is indeed unsavory.  It's not a huge jump from the word union=bad, to labor unions and organized labor themselves are bad, inherently bad; i.e. unions can never be good.  And just like that, the conservatives have won.  Union becomes unthinkable.  Even those of us on the left will not think of unions as a positive force for change.  We will have to get by with some other concept because the opposition has successfully limited the realm of thinkable thought. 

• We need to market ourselves/our idea

This is a variation on the argument above but this time I want to emphasize the word "market".  I don't want to "market" anything; I am not a capitalist.  In fact, I am proud to be an anti-capitalist.  I don't sell things.  I want to convince people of the goodness of an idea through nuanced, rational thought and careful consideration, not through catch-phrases and sound-bites.

This was what my professor pointed out: when we employ that concept of marketing an idea, we are buying into the notion that everything is about the market.  Everything --even debates and ideas-- are to be "sold".  The logic of the market pervades even our language and ways of thinking about things.  And to me, selling someone on an idea seems cheap and somehow less honorable; like I've pulled something over on them.  It's not a true conversion; it's a buying off.  I'm not convinced they really thought it through, they just agree with me.  It's profoundly dissatisfying.  I want to expect more of my fellow humans.  I expect them to use their heads, to think for themselves.  The story of how I changed my mind on this particular issue is a perfect example.  I didn't change my position because someone "sold" me on it.  I changed it because my professor challenged me to think more carefully about my position.

• But we can't call ourselves a union/ feminists/ whatever because we aren't united/homogenous.  We're a diverse group of people! 

Of course we are!  In any group there are a wide variety of people, with a wide variety of political views, some of which seem to be diametrically opposed to others within the same group.  But that doesn't mean that we can't unite and organize.  No one seriously thinks or would expect that any group of people is or should be homogenous.  Recognizing difference and uniting/organizing are not mutually exclusive.  We can and must do both.  To suggest that when people form groups they automatically exclude or gloss over differences sounds like a very reactionary idea.  Sure sometimes these things happen in groups and we have to work to overcome that, but the answer isn't to never form groups or coalitons of any kind because we want to respect human differences.  We can't use it as an excuse to prevent us from working together to change society or challenge injustice.  To argue that, sounds like a strategy the status quo would encourage to keep the people incapable of organizing to oppose it.  It certainly benefits them to encourage these sorts of ideas.

Finally, if I believe all this is true I have to work against the tide when we are asked to cede the terms of the debate.  I have to say no, I won't give up this word, this idea.  It's a good word, a good, honorable idea.  If I don't want "union" to be a dirty word in this country, I need to refuse to participate in treating it as such.  I use it and use it proudly.

I need to set an example for other people.  I want people to see me using unpopular words so that they can see that words like "union" and "feminism" are not dirty words, not unthinkable things, not off-limits.  I am pro-union.  I believe that the people united will never be defeated.  I believe that positive social change in this country has never come because politians felt generous enough to grant us civil liberties, 8 hour workdays and the right to vote.  Positive social change comes because people organize.  I'm pro-union and pro-feminist because I'm pro-human rights.  I will not give up these words/ideas.  I will not cede the terms of the debate.  We can reclaim these words, but only if we use them.

Gender: Substance or attribute?

Judith Butler is wowing me with feminist philosophy, saying that gender is an attribute not a person's substance. 

What's the difference?  In class last week my prof said her prof used to hold up a piece of chalk and ask the class what it was.  It's chalk, they said of course.  And what are its attributes?  It's white.  It's dusty.  It's breakable.  Chalk is the substance.  White, dusty and breakable are its attributes.  (So what's the difference then?  Isn't a thing just the sum of its attributes?  If you take away white, do you still have chalk?  Sure.  There's colored chalk.  If you take away dusty do you still have chalk?  Sure, there's "dustless" chalk... but if you take away ALL the attributes?  What's left?  What is the essence of chalk?  I don't know.  I'm only on chapter 2.)  So aside from that, what Judith Butler is trying to do is to get us to think about gender in terms of attribute versus substance.  Here is a person.  Here's their gender-parts.  Is that person their gender or is gender an attribute of that person?

She says most of us, even/especially? feminists, think of gender as something inherent in a person's personhood.  And that's wrong, see?   Gender is an attribute.  And to prove it, she uses psychoanalytic theory to  help us understand how we begin to think of gender.  That's nothing new; Freud did the same thing.  And this is where I began to lament the fact that I didn't pay more attention to old fellow in my undergraduate psych class.  (So fair warning: if you want to read Butler review your Freudian theory first!) 

Freud, she says, got it wrong.  Remember how the dude had this thing about the Oedipus and Electra complexes?  Yeah, well, it has to do with that stuff.  About the infant identifying first with the mother ('cause that's where the food comes from I guess) and then having to either disassociate himself from her if he's got male genitalia or to associate herself as similar to her if she's got female genitalia.  Something like that, I think.  Anyway, that's how Freud says we end up with particular gender identities and their respective gender roles and all that [apparently].  (How he explains how some people don't end up with gender identities that match their biological genitalia, I don't know).  Well, here's what that online study guide says about Freud:

Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women.

That is, Freud would say that it's your feminine disposition --your identification with the female disposition-- that desires men, not your masculine disposition.  For Freud, only opposites attract.  (Why do you think he'd make such a silly assumption? ;-)  When Freud's talking about the Oedipal and Electra complexes he's saying [I think] that the child not only has to choose between two object choices (male or female for the other) but between the two sexual disposition (masculine or feminine for herself).

Now she started this part of the book by talking about Freud's thing about melancholia being the ego taking on the attributes of the lost love.  It internalizes the other. At first I totally didn't get this but Butler says this has something to do with us taking on gender identity when we connect it up with the incest taboo. Ok?  Listen up: so the boy-child is in love with his mom, right?  But the incest-taboo says to him, no, kid, you can't do that.  What does he do? 

"In the case of a prohibited hetereosexual union, it is the object [the mother] which is denied but not the modality of desire [desire for the opposite] so that the desire is deflected from that object [the mother] onto other objects [other women].  But in the case of a prohibited homosexual union, it is clear that both the desire and the object require renunciation and so [get internalized].

The loss of the mother as a result of the incest-taboo for the boy-child means he either internalizes her (identifies with her) or he switches to identifying with his father and thus "consolidates" his masculinity.

And that the choice, Freud says, will depend on the strength or weakness of the masculine or feminine within that person.  Why?  He doesn't really say.  That's just that's the way that 19th century heterosexual white male saw things.

But that 19th century heterosexual white male also admitted he doesn't know what exactly this "feminine" or "masculine" essence is really. 

This is where Butler jumps in.  Is the masculine or the feminine is a result of the choice or an effect of it?  "To what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire?"  She says that these masculine and feminine dispositions, as Freud calls them, have heterosexual aims, that is, they intentionally normalize heterosexuality and pathologize homosexuality.  Why assume from the outset that the desire for the female object is not just as feminine as the desire for the male object?

At this point it reminded me of Adrienne Rich's essay On compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence, which I read as an undergraduate, and that was the first place I encountered the idea that it could actually be MORE natural for women to bond with other women and that it takes some work to get us to bond with men at all... -wait, was that that essay? or am I mixing it up?  So I go and re-read that essay and it's there sorta, but I thought I remembered it being more explicit.  I'm not sure.  My brain is all muddy from thinking about this stuff.

Anyway, that was just part three of the 2nd chapter and I'm still not quite sure how this connects back up with substance or attribute.  But she says that these so called "dispositions" are really just "traces of a history of enforces sexual prohibitions".  Which means.... ??? [to be continued]

On forming an oppositional consciousness

While that first chapter was a doozy, laying out the philosophical location of her argument, chapter 2 of Sandoval's book is much easier/more accessible.  Pretty much saying, you know all those different typologies of feminisms that white/western feminists are always talkin' about?  (liberal, Marxist, cultural, socialist*).  Well, any one of those by itself isn't going to get us anywhere.  We need/have a fifth: the differential/womanist/mestiza/third force. 

This fifth force is practiced and developed already by US 3rd world feminists (feminist women of color) and it weaves "between and among" all those different oppositional ideologies.  All those feminisms above are "tactics, not strategies".  They're none of them mutually exclusive.  We use them as tools selectively depending on our readings of power at that particular moment.  She (Sandoval) says it's "like the clutch of an automobile, [it's] the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power".  US 3rd world feminists/women of color have been doing this for years.  It's how you form not just a feminist movement but a whole history of oppositional consciousness. 

Cool!

It's a mapping of consciousness, a new cognitive map that Jameson said we needed to deal with postmodernism.  It's a "specific methodology that can be used as a compass for self-consciously organizing resistance, identity, praxis and coalition under contemporary U.S. late-captialist cultural conditions".  It comes from the margins and from the marginalized and this is how we will form that "new global feminism" that reaches across borders that Alice Chai was talking about in that quote below.

Methodology of the Oppressed

I am reading really cool book that is basically saying something to the effect of:

Fredric Jameson/Minority/1st world white person: oh dear!  The end of modernism has left me with fragmented identities/realities, the center does not hold, I don't know how we'll ever form a coherent resistance movement/standpoint from which to battle the dominant paradigm/hegemony!  Postmodernism is the worst thing that's ever happened to us!  It's the democratization of oppression.  Whatever will we do???

Majority/3rd world: Hey, you people up there in the rich Minority/1st world struggling with your existential postmodern angst of fragmented identities/realities, GET A GRIP!!!  The oppressed have always been fragmented.  We can teach you how to deal with it. 

(you have to understand that the text was filled with sentences such as "Empowerment occurs when the citizen-subject coordinates its existential data (the empirical postition of the subject) with unlived abstract conceptions of the geographic totality".  I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!  mumble, mumble, geographic totality, my ass, mumble, mumble...)

History is power.

Having heard Howard Zinn speak last night and reading a great history book for my fem theory class this week, I was thinking about how history, especially the history of social movements and about how knowing how other campaigns of the past were fought, can shed light on contemporary struggles.

Rather Silly 19th century Notions about Women

Take the women's sufferage movement for example.  A chapter of feminist historian Denise Riley's book focuses on this social movement to demonstrate how feminists of that era had to respond in various ways to 19th century notions of "women" in order to get the vote.  That left them having to argue against three rather silly notions (RSNs --my term not Riley's!):

RSN #1) if given the vote women would vote as a homogenous bloc and be inherently opposed to men.  One suffragist tried to placate such fears by saying that "We ask [for the vote so] that we may help in the choice of men to maintain a masculine Government.  We are not demanding the vote that we may elect women instead of, and in opposition to men" (Heaven forbid!)

RSN #2) women are really, very fundamentally different from and inferior to men.  A pro-sufferage woman wrote that "we neither deny nor minimise the differences between men and women.... Women bring something to the service of the state different from that which can be brought by men".  Another argued that such difference and inferiority didn't necessairly mean that women should not vote: "Granted let me be physically, intellectually and morally your inferior.  So long as you allow I possess moral responsibility and and sufficient intelligence to know right from wrong (a point I conclude you will concede, else why hang me for murder?)... It is only as a moral and intelligent being that I claim my civil rights".

RSN #3.) women are associated with the domestic sphere and men with the public sphere.  Sufferagists built upon this notion by arguing that giving the women the vote would help them be more public and John Stuart Mill argued that women and men had become closer over time and that women were in need of being pushed up into the political sphere so that men would not be dragged down into the domestic!  Interesting, eh?  It seems no one really argued that such a distinction of "spheres" was artificial and rather arbitrary.

In my previous post on this I summarized some of Riley's examples of how the notion of "women" changed over the 17th and 18th centuries.  The 19th and early 20th century feminists inherited these ideas of what "women" were and this affected how they had to argue their case for sufferage.  I think this is important to realize how in contemporary debates we can and should look at the underlying notions that are framing the debate and see what's NOT being questioned.

Rather Silly 21st century Notions about Iraq/Iraqis/the war.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is a great example and there are lots of RSNs tossed about even by those of us who oppose the war. How will we sound 100 years from now using arguments like these:

RSN #1) Iraqi lives are less valuable than U.S. lives. When we argue against the war and we use the number of US troops who have died as our primary argument, we leave unexamined the underlying assumption that if the war were not so costly to us, it would otherwise be okay. We leave unexamined the unstated notion that Iraqi lives are less valuable.

RSN #2) The U.S. invaded and now occupies Iraq for the purposes of making it a democratic country. When we use the argument that “democracy cannot be imposed at the point of a gun” we leave unexamined the notion that that is the real reason why we’re there in the first place. It implies a lack of understanding of the motivations of nation-states for going to war and what this means for citizens.

RSN #3) This war would be less problematic if only we could win it. When we argue that this is a war that CANnot be won, we leave unexamined the notion that it’s a war that SHOULD not be won. It’s a morally problematic war period. It’s old fashioned colonialism (as opposed to neo-colonialism which comes via neo-liberal economic globalization). It’s imperialistic. It’s an ugly, greedy, arrogant and cruel expansion of U.S. power into foreign soil and it’s morally wrong.

It's easy for us to see the folly of 19th century RSNs.  It will be easy for us to see the folly of 21st century RSNs 100 years from now.  But what about today?  How can we make theoretically sound arguments about issues today?

We can do it by studying our history.  Let's undo Rather Silly Notions such as:

• Iraqi lives aren't as valuable as US lives
• that the US invaded and occupied a foreign country in order to "bring them democracy"
• this is a war that would be okay if only we could win it.

What will our grandchildren think of us if we argue against the war based on any of those RSNs?  I think they'd think that we were Rather Silly People.

-------

This post is dedicated to Howard Zinn, who knows more than anyone I know, the power of history and it is crossposted at Bring it On!.

The evolution of women.

So a coupla posts ago I told you I was reading this book by Denise Riley called Am I that name? about the notion of "women" and how that concept has evolved over time (and despite what we might think is ever-evolving and shifting about).  And I told you (I think) how she describes that at certain periods of time, for example, during the 18th century these people who are categorized as women were thought to be more "saturated" by their sex/gender than those who are categorized as men so that the gender was thought to invade the whole person (women weren't supposed to vote because they weren't rational and all that jazz).  The fact of their gender permeated their whole being, in a way that didn't happen for men. 

Today I'm reading that she says this process of evolution wasn't simply linear; it correlated with changing ideas in theology, increasing secularization and Enlightenment ideas about the nature of the person and of Nature.  And also there's this influence of Cartesian distinctions between mind, body and soul which, given that women were already identified with the body and carnality, further distanced her from reason. 

Huh.  I didn't know that. 

But she says also that "to meditate about how the gendered subject is consolidated can draw one into vast areas of speculation, .... [where] even the ancient philosophy and theology known to the West would be 'ethnocentric' and restrictive." 

But that we should try anyway.  Um, okay!  Who wants to go first?  She does! (It's her book.) 

Does the soul have a sex? 

Or is the body so sexed that it seeps through to the soul? 

In the 12 and 14th centuries women were not fully consigned to the body.  "A continuum of sensual and spiritual ecstasy was at the least a possibility for both sexes... The religiosity of a swooning female passivity, the eroticised icon most familiar to us in Bernini's rendering of St. Theresa is a later interpretation".  Not that they were completely free of the hierarchy of sex but Riley says it's a question of emphasis. 

There Aristotelian (physiological) concepts of women as an inferior man.  Theology of the time answered that these gender inequalities are only Earth-bound, in heaven all is well.  The soul has no sex.  Quakers and later 17th century feminists used these arguments a lot as they provide the basis for arguing that women's faults were not due to their innate deficiencies but to poor conditioning by society.  This was not to last long though.  Secular theories about human nature in general began to empahsize sexual difference between men and women.  "The darkness of the soul underwent an increasing sexualization in theological thought in England after the Restoration while the later languages of natural right in the secular world were largely unperturbed by the soul and saw [Nurture trump Nature]...As the possibilities of arguing from the natural democracy of the soul fell away, the associations of 'women' with the natural were magnified"  It became an either or question.  Rousseau, she says is the perfect example of this.  He promoted a highly sexualized version of human nature.  Women were "placed neither in the order of nature, nor in the order of society".

Then in the 18th century there was according to [historian?] Ian Watts "a tremendous narrowing of the ethical scale, a redefinition of virtue primarily in sexual terms" (ah, the Victorians!) and the whole being of a woman was by now defined by her sex and sex is terribly close to sexuality and sexuality is depraved, well, women, of course are "radically handicapped in their very existence".  Long gone the days of appealing to an ungendered soul.  "Those version of spirituality which the 19th century elaborated were... given to asserting the distinctively 'womanly' soul in which the supposedly highest qualities of femininity were refined." 

In sum,"it was not merely that ideas about women had changed.  The whole meaning of 'woman' had been transformed once the concept of the female person as thoroughly sexed through all her regions of being had become entrenched.  As the neutral domains of the soul had contracted, so it had become possible to be a sex."

Talkin' and thinkin' about...

I'm having lots of disparate conversations today, all of them interesting and all deserving of a long thoughtful post in and of themselves.  But I wanna know which of these, if any, you are interested in. So here's a sorta synopsis.

I'm having an email exchange with another blogger about patriotism.  It started out because he mentioned he joined the army during the first gulf war even though he didn't believe in the morality of the war.  And he did this because, he argues, that whatever the rightness or wrongness of the motivations behind the war when your country is actually engaged in the fighting there's an obligation of some sort to support them and even go fight it.  (Stephen, I hope I'm presenting the argument here fairly).  It's an argument I've heard before but don't really "get".  Does this mean if we were Germans back in the 30s and we didn't believe or support the Nazi Party we'd still be obligated to fight with them against the Allies?

The second part of that discussion involves him being Native American.  Where do you place your allegiance then?  What is your home turf?  The nation-state that colonized your people?  Why do so many Native Americans join the Army? (he has a post on that here)  And what about a warrior-ethic (if that's the right word to mean to value the right to self-defense) for oppressed societies?  Does that necessarily get turned into terrorism if the US doesn't recognize your group's sovereignty?  So what is sovereignty?  And who decides?

And then there are conversations over at FLA Politics (in the comments section here) about how empires decline (by overstretching themselves and not taking care of the environment and all that) and how Bush's budget proposals are so emblematic of that.  And also  the power of bookgroups and salons, small groups getting together to just talk about and discuss the issues of the day and that got me thinking of how much I love small groups, the egalitarianism of them, the democracy of them, the participatory-ness.  And how we're so lucky to live in the 21st century because we could, theoretically, combine all the wonderfulness of small groups with the political force of networked constituencies and wouldn't that be a way to get the best of both worlds (egalitarianism and democracy AND political power).

And then I've got some idea in the back of my head about sexualities and attraction and relationships... and by the way, people had such a great conversation going on down there on that first open thread I don't want to cut it off because it's gonna get knocked off the front page here so I'll post a link on the sidebar for a little while in case you want to keep it going.  As for which of the above topics, conviently highlighted for you in red, I'm not really going to post more on all or any of them ('cept for maybe sovereignty or patriotism) but I still thought I'd throw them out there.

Time for reparations for less developed countries?

Last semester I read a book by an African Studies professor in which the author argued that war-making and state-making go hand in hand and the path to a highly organized nation-state lies in going through centuries of warfare. The reason there are so many failed states in Africa is because they didn't do this (mostly because of the geography of the land and resources). He didn't flat out say Africa just needs to have more wars but that was the unstated conclusion.

This week in Trade and Human Rights Law, we talked about the intersection of trade agreements and labor rights.  It turns out that the most vocal opponents of inscribing labor laws into trade agreements are less-developed-countries (LDCs) because, they argue, cheap labor is their comparative advantage and since well-off countries had to go through a period of slave-labor and gross exploitation in order to get to where they are today, we should be accorded the same leeway.  Should be obvious that the people in the LDCs who argue this are not the people who would have to work in the sweatshops.

My response to that is this: While I recognize the basis of the argument that well-off countries got well off because they exploited other countries, (really, if wealth were based on possession of natural resources Guatemala would be one of the richest countries in the world instead of one of the poorest), I'm suspicious of this idea that the only path to "development" is by exploitation, if not of the labor of other countries' citizens, then by the labor of your own. Like the "war is the path to building strong states" argument, there are obvious ethical implications which are hugely problematic here. I can't believe any serious-minded person would actually consider telling African states to try to have more wars; the corollary statement, saying to LDCs that they should have more sweatshops, is just as repugnant.

So let's go back to where these well-off countries got their wealth. We got it from slavery, from colonialism, from war-making... etc. From exploiting other people. Workers create all wealth. The more you can get them to work for little or nothing, the more wealth you create for yourself. Veronica's right. It's not sustainable. We can have so much only because others have so little . Considering that this is where our wealth comes from (the stolen labor of millions of people in the Third World), I'd argue that the most logical response to helping LDCs move upwards is to think about REPARATIONS. We stole it from them, the answer is not for them to steal it from someone else (or from their own workers). It's for us to give it back!

Development is a terribly misleading word for so many reasons, (remind me to write a post on some of the other ones one day).  One of those reasons is that it frames the issue in a way that leads us to think of world productivity in terms of a zero-sum game. Winners win only at the cost of the losers' loss. Under such a system, sure, the only way to raise standards of living come by reducing someone else's. What we want, though, is not to shift the wealth and poverty around but to distribute it more equitably. Don't think "development" think "redistribution".

UPDATE: While visiting nosweatapparel.com I wanted to find an image I could put up here on the blog and found that not only do that allow that but they'll give me 7% of any sales that come from someone clicking thru that link!  So if you're in the market for some new duds and want also to help fund Lucky White Girl... feel free to click away!
 

Mr. Smith's idea

Once upon a time there was this dude.  We'll call him Mr. Smith.  So Mr. Smith is the type of dude who sits around thinking of ways human beings can organize themselves to produce the things we need for society.  So he says the best way for us to do that is for everyone to just do what's best for him/herself and because the interest of the individual is equivalent to the interest of the community it'll all work out in the end. 

What is citizenship?

That was the question we tried to answer in class today.  The readings all addressed the impact of international trade laws on citizenship.  One article (by an economist) talked about how globalization is redefining notions of citizenship.  Which raises some interesting questions about the nature of the actors on the world stage: who they are (people, nation-states, corporations or international institutions?) and what rights and responsibilities they should have. She argues that neoliberal economic policies that favor transnational entities such as corporations and international organizations over national sovereignty effectively give them (these large transnational and international institutions) the "economic rights" originally meant to protect people.

I wrote a sorta long diatribe:

Still more on authentic help

Well, my friend finally showed up around noon.  And it turned out to be a really nice visit.  She's actually taken a film course (and is a really good photographer) so she has a bit more of an idea when it comes to low-budget filmmaking and stuff like that.  She said she has been interested in documentary filmmaking also.  I'd like to have more conversations with her about stuff like that. 

We also talked about Chicago and some mutual friends and colleagues.  We're both sorta in the "helping" professions and I was telling her some of the things I've been thinking about again regarding Paulo Freire's notion of "authentic help" whereby you try to avoid the dichotomy between the helpers and the helped and the "help" (I don't actually like that term) is a collaborative process based on the idea that it's not done out of charity but out of recognition that it's in the interests of all involved.

Spike Lee on filmmaking and dreaming

Spike Lee was great.  He talked about how he got into filmmaking, the importance of the image in our society, how the people who sometimes most discourage dreams are parents by pushing their kids into "practical" careers instead of letting them follow their hearts.  Pick a major that you love because life's too short... oh he mentioned that he'd done that DNA test to find out where his ancestors are from and he discovered that they come from the areas now known as Cameron and Sierra Leon.  He wants to visit.

He talked about how despite the gains African-Americans have made on the screen (as actors) there's still no African-American who can green light a project (behind the scenes).  The film he's most proud of is Malcolm X.  He was overbudget and had to ask rich black people he knew for donations to finish it.  He was at the end of the list and he only had two people left.  Magic Johnson and and Michael Jordan and thing about Michael Jordan is that he's real competitive so when he asked how much he needed, he just told him how much Magic Johnson gave.  And he talked about how Denzel Washington shoulda got an Oscar for his role in the film but that's not how it works (people get passed over and then win because they got passed over for something else)...oh, and he talked about the difference between New York filmmakers and California ones. 

So it was very informal talk but very informative.