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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 4 years

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The Cops In Our Heads: Some thoughts on anarchy and morality

In my travels over the past several months, I have talked with many anarchists who conceive of anarchy as a moral principle. Some go so far as to speak of anarchy as though it were a deity to whom they had given themselves--reinforcing my feeling that those who really want to experience anarchy may need to divorce themselves from anarchism.

The most frequent of the moral conceptions of anarchy I heard defined anarchy as a principled refusal to use force to impose one's will on others. This conception has implications which I cannot accept. It implies that domination is mainly a matter of personal moral decisions rather than of social roles and relationships, that all of us are equally in a position to exercise domination and that we need to exercise self-discipline to prevent ourselves from doing so. If domination is a matter of social roles and social relationships, this moral principle is utterly absurd, being nothing more than a way of separating the politically correct (the elect) from the politically incorrect (the damned). This definition of anarchy places anarchic rebels in a position of even greater weakness in an already lopsided struggle against authority. All forms of violence against people or property, general strikes, theft and even such tame activities as civil disobedience constitute a use of force to impose one's will. To refuse to use force to impose one's will is to become totally passive--to become a slave. This conception of anarchy makes it a rule to control our lives, and that is an oxymoron.

The attempt to make a moral principle of anarchy distorts its real significance. Anarchy describes a particular type of situation, one in which either authority does not exist or its power to control is negated. Such a situation guarantees nothing--not even the continued existence of that situation, but it does open up the possibility for each of us to start creating our lives for ourselves in terms of our own desires and passions rather than in terms of social roles and the demands of social order. Anarchy is not the goal of revolution; it is the situation which makes the only type of revolution that interests me possible --an uprising of individuals to create their lives for themselves and destroy what stands in their way. It is a situation free of any moral implications, presenting to each of us the amoral challenge to live our lives without constraints.

Since the anarchic situation is amoral, the idea of an anarchist morality is highly suspect. Morality is a system of principles defining what constitutes right and wrong behavior. It implies some absolute outside of individuals by which they are to define themselves, a commonality of all people that makes certain principles applicable to everyone.

I don't wish to deal with the concept of the "commonality of all people" in this article: My present point is that whatever morality is based upon, it always stands outside of and above the living individual. Whether the basis or morality is god, patriotism, common humanity, production needs, natural law, "the Earth," anarchy, or even "the individual" as a principle, it is always an abstract ideal that rules over US" Morality is a form of authority and will be undermined by an anarchic situation as much as any other authority if that situation is to last.

Morality and judgment go hand in hand. Criticism--even harsh, cruel criticism--is essential to honing our rebellious analysis and practice, but judgment needs to be utterly eradicated. Judgment categorizes people as guilty or not guilty--and guilt is one of the most powerful weapons of repression. When we judge and condemn ourselves or anyone else, we are suppressing rebellion--that is the purpose of guilt. (This does not mean that we "shouldn't" hate, or wish to kill anyone--it would be absurd to create an "amoral" morality, but our hatred needs to be recognized as a personal passion and not defined in moral terms.) Radical critique grows from the real experiences, activities, passions and desires of individuals and aims at liberating rebelliousness. Judgment springs from principles and ideals that stand above us; it aims at enslaving us to those ideals. Where anarchic situations have arisen, judgment has often temporarily disappeared, freeing people of guilt-- as in certain riots where people of all sorts looted together in a spirit of joy in spite of having been taught all of their lives to respect property. Morality requires guilt; freedom requires the elimination of guilt.

A dadaist once said, "Being governed by morals... has made it impossible for us to be anything other than passive toward the policeman; this is the source of our slavery." Certainly, morality is a source of passivity. I have heard of several situations in which fairly large-scale anarchic situations started to develop and have experienced minor ones, but in each of these situations, the energy dissipated and most participants returned to the non-lives they'd lived before the uprisings. These events show that, in spite of the extent to which social control permeates all of our waking (and much of our sleeping) lives, we can break out. But the cops in our heads--the morality, guilt and fear--have to be dealt with. Every moral system, no matter what claims it makes to the contrary, places limits on the possibilities available to us, constraints upon our desires; and these limits are not based on our actual capabilities, but on abstract ideas that keep us from exploring the full extent of our capabilities. When anarchic situations have arisen in the past, the cops in peoples' heads--the ingrained fear, morality and guilt--have frightened people, keeping them tame enough to retreat back into the safety of their cages, and the anarchic situation disappeared.

This is significant because anarchic situations don't just pop out of nowhere--they spring from the activities of people frustrated with their lives. It is possible for each of us at any moment to create such a situation. Often this would be tactically foolish, but the possibility is there. Yet we all seem to wait patiently for anarchic situations to drop from the sky-- and when they do explode forth, we can't keep them going. Even those of us who have consciously rejected morality find ourselves hesitating, stopping to examine each action, fearing the cops even when there are no external cops around. Morality, guilt and fear of condemnation act as cops in our heads, destroying our spontaneity, our wildness, our ability to live our lives to the full.

The cops in our heads will continue to suppress our rebelliousness until we learn to take risks. I don't mean that we have to be stupid--jail is not an anarchic or liberatory situation, but without risk, there is no adventure, no life. Self-motivated activity--activity that springs from our passions and desires, not from attempts to conform to certain principles and ideals or to blend in to any group (including "anarchists") -is what can create a situation of anarchy, what can open up a world of possibilities limited only by our capabilities. To learn to freely express our passions--a skill earned only by doing it--is essential. When we feel disgust, anger, joy, desire, sadness, love, hatred, we need to express them. It isn't easy. More often than not, I find myself falling into the appropriate social role in situations where I want to express something different. I'll go into a store feeling disgust for the whole process of economic relationships, and yet politely thank the clerk for putting me through just that process. Were I doing this consciously, as a cover for shoplifting; it would be fun, using my wits to get what I want; but it is an ingrained social response--a cop in my head. I am improving; but I have a hell of a long way to go. Increasingly, I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring about what others think of me. This is a self-motivated activity--the activity that springs from our passions and desires, from our suppressed imaginations, our unique creativity. Sure, following our subjectivity this way, living our lives for ourselves, can lead us to make mistakes, but never mistakes comparable to the mistake of accepting the zombie existence that obedience to authority, morality, rules or higher powers creates. Life without risks, without the possibility of mistakes, is no life at all. Only by taking the risk of defying all authority and living for ourselves will we ever live life to the full.

I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities so that I can create my life for myself--at every moment. This means breaking down all social roles and destroying all morality. When an anarchist or any other radical starts preaching their moral principles at me--whether non-coercion, deep ecology, communism, militantism or even ideologically-required "pleasure"--I hear a cop or a priest, and I have no desire to deal with people as cops or priests, except to defy them. I am struggling to create a situation in which I can live freely, being all that I desire to be, in a world of free individuals with whom I can relate in terms of our desires without constraints. I have enough cops in my head --as well as those out on the streets--to deal with without having to deal with the cops of "anarchist" or radical morality as well. Anarchy and morality are opposed to each other, and any effective opposition to authority will need to oppose morality and eradicate the cops in our heads.

#feral faun #individualism #individualist anarchy #morality #nihilism #anarchy a journal of desire armed #ajoda

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gatheringbones · 4 years

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may I ask a writing question...i experience fairly extreme highs and lows; one day im in love w what im doing, the next the spark is gone, doubt creeps in, I bore myself, etc. do u have any ways of preventing a crash, or limiting its duration? i always keep writing thru them, even if i switch projects, because i know as far as “determination vs inspiration” goes, one is more reliable than the other. (1)

maybe u don’t experience this, or maybe this is just inevitable, but when im in love w what im doing, i feel like i have to drop everything else because i know what might follow the high. i wonder if u have ideas on attaining a more steady writing vibe. would love to hear your thoughts if you feel like sharing! you contain many wisdoms🖤 (2)

I think that the attitude of continuous sustained growth is unrealistic, frankly, I think that there’s always going to be cycles of growth and decay and rain and drought and that “decay and drought” are necessary periods built straight into the writing process that are beneficial to both you and your work.

drought means digging reservoirs and building aquifers and studying the water table; decay means compost and compost needs to be aired and turned. entering into a state of the process when you feel like your drive forward has petered out means that you’ve entered a critical period of reflection and improvement; it means kindly and constructively sitting with the work you’ve already done and finding jumping-off points or missed connections inside of it that fill you with excitement.

it also means that, like composting, sometimes you need to fix the ph balance of the soil by bringing something new into it; by focusing on your research and improving your store of language. It’s why we’re so lucky to be in a period of time where everyone under the sun is sharing as much art and philosophy and radical ideas as they possibly can (especially when we’re all doing that to comfort and inspire each other as we work creatively to fix an incredibly broken world). If you feel like your imagination’s run out, raise the ceiling of it; add more chicken manure, more eggshells, more coffee grounds, grow and develop your imagination with as many different sources as you can and let it all cook down into the growth medium you’ll need to feed your writing. I don’t know how the hell I thought I was going to write about liberatory queer identities and challenging power structures without consuming as much real-world language about what those identities and challenges look like— actually, I do know, it felt and read as stunted, because it was stunted. I needed to combine my writing with activities that fed my writing and fed my writer’s brain at the same time, to pack it full of all the connections and systemic language I would need in order to construct a sequence of events and motifs that would result in the story I wanted to tell.

taking a break, reading/reflecting, responding to your reading/reflection, and building that response into your work is a necessary cycle of growth and decay; it’s useful. There’s absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong about undergoing a “crash”.

#writing thoughts #terra preta

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christimesteele · 3 years

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Transcript - Time Talks Ep 37 - Felicia Rose Chavez on Poetry, Dismantling Patriarchy, Anti-Racist Writing Workshops, Mutualism, Building Power, and Grief

chris time steele 00:06

Welcome to Episode 37 of the Time Talks podcast part of the channel zero network. This month I had the opportunity to speak to Felicia Rose Chavez, along with being an educator and professor, Chavez is an activist, writer and author of the book The Anti Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative C lassroom. In this episode, Felicia Rose Chavez spoke about poetry, dismantling patriarchy, anti racist writing workshops, mutualism, building power and grief. Thank you to awareness for the music. And here's a brief jingle by fellow channel zero network member.

Silverthreads 00:41

still walking, still waking is co hosted by me carla bergman, and me Eleanor Goldfield. This is where we interview long term organizers and radicals about their watershed moments, what they've learned along the way and how they maintain their hope on this path, dreaming and building emergent worlds for a present and future anchored in justice and freedom for all because there are forks in the road. But they all lead us home to the fight to the build

chris time steele 01:38

You wrote about the influence of June Jordan's Poetry for the People. I wanted to read an excerpt from it because I feel your book does this just so much as well and your writing. I read all of your, most of your short stories and essays that I could find online as well which were just so powerful. She writes, "poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair and build revolution in which speaking, and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter." And building on top of this, I was wondering if you could speak on a transformational moment. I don't know if this goes back to when you went to Albuquerque Academy, or after it or before or maybe it's a process, a moment that radicalized you to interrogate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy further, but to also fight against it, but also building outside of it?

Felicia Rose Chavez 02:48

That's a powerful question. I don't believe that it's any one moment. I mean, I think there are shocking moments that we lived through, that we can point to and remember, by the narrative that I've had the opportunity to reflect on is one of consistent lived experiences that I like to think of as splinters right, they just kind of splinter under the skin where you're like, something's not right about that. That's not, is it just me, am I being crazy? Am I being overly sensitive, or why being too critical? And it happens again, and again, and again, until something's just like so much in your face that you can't, you can't deny it anymore. And you have a choice to make, you know, do I, you know, shake my head walk away, talk about it later, rant privately with my friends, my parents, my partner, or do I take action against it. And I think it took me many, many years to finally commit to that action. First through proper channels. You know, like in graduate school, I was petitioning for change and working on academic committees, working with faculty to create my own class. And nothing happened as a result of that. I mean, it was a lot of extra labor with no real fruit. So it took me writing down my own experience on the page and being vulnerable, and saying, hey, you know, I'm going to I'm going to count these splinters, I'm going to take them out one by one. And that started as early as, you know, elementary school where you're like, ah, why am I being treated differently as a student of color, you know, and then throughout middle school in high school, as you said, I went to a private predominantly white school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And by that senior year, I was furious. The context of college changed everything. You know, when I when I saw how easily my peers kind of transitioned into higher education, as though it were all laid out for them. And it was, you know, it was it was predestined. And for me it was real work, something I had to kind of claw for, and hang on to. So, you know, I guess the ability to articulate what it is that was wrong, presented itself in my teenage years. But it wasn't until later in life in my in my 30s, really where I was able to put it down on the page in a way that felt like I was doing it justice.

chris time steele 05:36

Your thoughts about that moment were really, blossoming. When you were in Iceland, going back to when you said, when you were in elementary school, I remember you mentioning, in the book or a talk when you handed your husband, something from the third grade, where you were really,

Felicia Rose Chavez 05:54

He was like, really, we're going all the way back? And I'm like, yeah, we're going all the way back. But that experience of reading, the very earliest rendition of the book was a 10 minute speech, where I just spoke to what I experienced at the University of Iowa as an MFA graduate student in creative nonfiction writing. And then a list of practical strategies that I do now kind of pivoting, from the way I was taught and embracing a new way to teach creative writing in the classroom. And I cried during that speech I stood up and just cried and cried. Because I was saying it. I was, it was my testimony, I was testifying to the people I went to school with and the people who taught me they were in the room. And I was, I was really summoning the courage to say what I experienced out loud, I think so many of us don't, we don't have that opportunity to go back and say, listen, this is what happened to me here. And we need to change so that this doesn't happen again, to your current students and your future students, it was a powerful, powerful moment that I think emboldened me to move forward to write the book.

chris time steele 07:12

And I really thought the Iceland story was so powerful, because you said in, in one moment, you were so emotional, and cried, because you felt like you were betraying some of these people. But at the same time, when you when you did that, you found that you had so many people on your side, you know, when people were passing around the paper and trying to dismantle the systems that you spoke about was so violent.

Felicia Rose Chavez 07:39

That was the great surprise of this book. And it happened twice. So once in Iceland, where I'm sobbing, because I think, what are they going to say, you know, and then I get this glorious response as you said from, from both the people of color in the room and the white educators in the room who said, we don't want to, we don't want to replicate this sort of harm. So what can we do to help? You know, like, can we have a copy of your speech? Send it to us, you know, and I thought, well, I could do more than a speech, i'll write on this, I'll really give it everything I have. But in the process of writing, I can't tell you. I mean, it was two years of constant paranoia, I mean, really awful, agonizing moments, day and night, where not only am I dredging up, hard to confront moments from my past and trying to make art out of it, trying to make a message out of it. But at the same time, I'm thinking, this person from graduate school is going to call me a liar. This person who taught me is going to is going to, you know, say that I got it all wrong. This person, I mean, I just was constantly thinking of strategies of defensiveness and dismissiveness and denial that has been the signature moves of white supremacy throughout all of our lives, right throughout history, and so I thought how many people are going to shut this down before he even has a chance to speak to anyone? Luckily, before it was published, as we were in the editing phase, a group at the University of Iowa called Black at Iowa Writers came forward and started calling out faculty members by name, specifically one faculty member John Degotta(?) and spoke out against their unfair treatment in the nonfiction writing program. I wasn't hip to it, a friend kind of nudged me to check out this social media account and I cried and cried. Then too, I mean, just out of pure relief, that it was real, that this experience was shared, and that someone was bold enough to come out before me and do this work. And then in an, in a sense, hold my hand and walk me through the process so that I could be brave enough to do it next.

chris time steele 10:08

Thank you for sharing that story. That's, that's really powerful. And it really shows you that when you have the courage to stand up, that others are going to stand with you, even though they feel so alone. And that vulnerable moment,

Felicia Rose Chavez 10:20

Absolutely, they didn't know, no one knew that I was working on this manuscript, it wasn't like I kept in touch with the alumni committee. You know, like, you never know, you never know how your work is going to impact someone, how your story, just sharing it aloud, it's gonna impact someone to, to go on and share their own story. And that's the power in in storytelling, right. And so, that was such a relief for me to feel supported in that way and less isolated.

chris time steele 10:55

I think, another part of your, your writing that has such a liberatory and powerful effect is that you call out these systems as they are by using bell hooks, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It's, it's right out in the open is, it's not something that some writers try to hide it by talking about systems and things like this and something so refreshing about your work. And you explicitly tell your story, which I feel calls out patriarchy as well. You mentioned how a colleague had to leave, and someone said we don't want to mother, these students and I loved how you reformatted the language. And you made it so powerful of talking about how we are multitudes mothered again and again in rhythm and time. And you talk about in the piece Color Lines about the coop living situation and the racism and patriarchy you had to endure there. From your story, the Brown Line, which just, which would be a simple walk for a man is this horrifying event for you. And for a woman that shows that inside your house, you have sanctuary but you should have that outside as well. It should be your sanctuary, your stories make these be so apparent. And was just wondering if if these tools to dismantle these systems like patriarchy? Is it just in the writing? Or what are some strategies you use to help dismantle or show these systems with students or more in your own writing?

Felicia Rose Chavez 12:30

Well, first of all, thank you, I feel so heard and seen by that quick analysis. That was really that was wonderful for me. Thank you for, for that quick overview of different works that I've put out in the world. That was really special. Yeah, I think that it takes this reorienting, we're so accustomed to, especially within our educational journeys to say the right thing, to be what ever the person in front of us teaching us needs us to be in order to move forward, move on, get the grade, whatever it may be, right tune out. My practice, at heart, it's about tuning in, it's about doing the opposite, right? It's not about the authority in the room. It's about becoming our own authority. And the more that we can tune in and quiet everything around us, and listen. And the first step is to listen to our fears, and to listen to our insecurities, because that's just another iteration of white supremacy in our brain. So it's just another form of manipulation and control to say, you can't do this, you're not any good at this. Who do you think you are? Right? And sometimes these are the voices within our own families from internalized racism, right? This is who you know, who do you owe your fancy? Who do you think you are? Right? So, so these are, these are the voices that haunt us, but they live there and they're not going away? We just got to acknowledge that that's what that is. And then we move forward and we say, Okay, if I can move past fear, right, what do I want to try? What do I want to risk and failure's okay. So if we just accept the failures, okay, what do I want to try? And when we attempt something, whatever classroom it may be, it doesn't have to be a creative writing classroom. My goal was the anti racist writing workshop, is to couch it in creative writing, but like, please extend it. Right? I'm working with science teachers, I'm working with math teachers and working with history teachers, like extend it beyond, let's activate our imaginations to see how much we can empower students across the academic curriculum. And so we we embolden our students to try something that they're afraid to try and, and then as they're doing it, we ask them to listen. How's it going? check in with yourself? What are you proud of? What, what's really hard for you? What do you want this to be? But it's not yet, right? And we ask questions, encourage students to ask questions of themselves to be their own assessors. And then finally, how did it go? Right? What do you think about what you produced? What do you want to change, if you had an opportunity to change it, go on and try it, right? until they're able to tune in and say, I trust my own voice, I trust who I am, my gut, whatever we want to call it right to be able to go inward and say, I'm going to tune you out right now and listen to me. And I think that is so powerful for all of our students, but especially our students of color, and especially our young women of color, who can say, okay, now I can trust me, I'm going to listen to that voice that tells me this is an unsafe situation. I'm going to listen to that voice that says leave now. Right? I'm going to listen to that voice that says you cannot talk to me. No, thank you. Don't talk to me that way. And I'm going to trust that voice. And I'm going to act on it. So it is, as I said, it's couched in creative writing. But the whole gist of it is, how can we truly embrace our own voices and exercise those voices to create change in our culture?

chris time steele 16:28

Yeah, I love that answer. And you really talk about boundaries in your in your book as well. And how were you when you were turning 30. And you talked about the trust in yourself and the power of No, and how this helped you fight back against educational and academic trauma that you were experiencing?

Felicia Rose Chavez 16:46

Yeah, that that was the turn for me, was becoming a mother. And it was a really hard time period in my life. My husband, I was a new mother. And I don't consider myself maternal. And there are some women who are like that I've since learned, you know, are we like, you know, I changed the diaper for the first time when I changed my son's diaper. It was on on the job learning. And, and I had I experienced postpartum depression, probably as a situational and hormonal kind of situation, we had just moved to a new town, my husband took on a new job, he was traveling a lot, I didn't know anybody. And I just remember being in the house a lot. There was this huge wildfire. And so we weren't allowed to go outside for weeks because of the smoke. And so it was just like, contained. And and this, not a good recipe for mental health, for a new mother especially. And it was then that I start I knew I had to speak up. Like I knew I had to start saying what I wanted, what I needed. And so that was a that was a big turn for me. Again, intricately linked with with being a woman.

chris time steele 18:05

I was wondering on my next question, Is this the kind of two questions they may relate I notice a lot of mutualism in your writing in your pedagogy? How you talk about deep listening, it also reminds me of some of those Zapatista teachings of asking, we walk kind of that we, we learn as we go, and we reflect as we go. But we don't get paralyzed by that fear. I was wondering if if there's a relation with mutualism, with your inspiration for your writing. And it also sees this ties in with Audre Lorde on quote you used, the way we can do is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time as we are resisting it.

Felicia Rose Chavez 18:51

I mean, that's, that's the difficulty that presents itself, right is that we're on a learning journey together as educators, those of us who are invested in doing the work, and I'm doing facilitations now all over the country, with elementary, middle, high school, undergraduate and graduate teachers, who are eager to learn that the question comes up again and again, is this the right place to do this work? Can we do this work within the institution? How do we, how do we flourish when the structure is set up so that we fail? And it's a tough question? It's a question that's keeping me up at night. Especially when it comes to our younger students like they're so they're held to a particular learning standard, right? Very strict learning standard. And there's no collapsing that system yet. As one brilliant educator just shared with me the other day on a meeting. He said let's do it anyway. With our with our kiddos with our little ones, let's just do it. Let's Let's lead them through an anti racist writing workshop curriculum. And then they'll become the next generation to overturn the standardized tests and the learning standards that they've been held prisoner to, for so, so long. And I thought that was really exciting, exciting way to think about it, right? How do we, how do we learn along the journey to change the restrictions that we face on a daily basis? Right. And it's, it's reminiscent of that last letter that I include in the book, which is addressed to the reader? And it's something like how do we live racism and mourn racism and fight racism all at the same time, it feels impossible, sometimes it's just, I'm just gonna lie in the bed, be useless, because I'm so overwhelmed by all of this. And then there are other days where you can take on the fight and try to change the system within so

chris time steele 21:03

are you referring to the Letter to Close? When the police officer was blocking your driveway? This, this may lead to my my next question. And you may have already answered it with I really liked that answer. We're planting the seeds, and the students in the next generations to fight the threat to blossoming that is in academia or just education systems. And this question is of the do you worry about your book being co opted by liberal institutions? As an example, after George Floyd was murdered, we saw many businesses and colleges make statements about white supremacy and racial justice. But at the same time, there's been so many murders since then, of people of color Black, Indigenous communities and Black trans communities. And also with the recent killings of Daunte Wright and now Adam Toledo. My academic institution has been silent as well. Do you worry, the term anti racist writing workshop will be branded but still reproduce the violent and toxic problems that you wrote about?

Felicia Rose Chavez 22:11

I mean, likely? Likely, I mean, look at, you know, these schools that I'm working with now, quite a few of them preempted, you know, before the book preemptively took on this anti racist initiative. Right, Colorado College, whom I work for, has taken on an anti racist initiative college wide. They're attempting to do the work. I feel, perhaps more so than some of the colleges that I kind of, you know, step foot in, and then and then exit. When I do these facilitations. They're at the very beginning of this initiative, whatever they label it is true anti racist work. I wouldn't call it that. Right. I think that's the term that's popular at the moment. But hey, that's a lot further than what we were three years ago, right? No one was throwing around that term at the college and university level, to the extent that they are now, again, co opting is the right term. I think that they're putting out fires. Because students are demanding again and again and again, that there's change. So I think it's a gesture to address those concerns. The real work happens daily, and college wide. And that's where we get into trouble. Because I think the attitude of many faculty members is, oh, well, we'll just have to wait on so and so's retirement in order to stop implementing harm. Because we all know so and so is, you know, horribly terrible, right? There's this 10 year old system where we have folks who are irresponsibly educating their students, it's hard for me to enter into the Zoom space and do these facilitations when I can see the dismissiveness at play sometimes with faculty. This isn't to say that it's always this way. Sometimes they're very sincere groups who are asking a lot of questions that are very engaged. Sometimes people turn their turn their bodies away from me, they'll roll their eyes, they'll sigh they're clearly doing something else, right. they're required to be there to hear me out or tune me out, whatever it is that they're doing. The University of Iowa just brought me in to do a panel and a public reading, which was a surprise for me, and it was one of the worst couple of weeks I've had since the book came out. I was not eating well, I couldn't sleep. It was reliving a trauma that I hadn't anticipated would be so difficult. For me, and it truly was, and I think that was also damage control. Right? I think it was putting public facing events out to the world to say, Yes, she, you know, she writes about her experience. So look, we're listening to her, will there be change that comes as a result of that I'm not facilitating workshops with those faculty members. And I'm curious if that does happen, right? I don't know. It's disappointing a lot of the time, and I get a lot of hate mail. And you've talked about the gendered politics of this all I mean, there's horribly sexist, as well as racist. And it's discouraging. It's disappointing to hear echoes of these hate messages out of the mouths of professors who are responsible for generations of students, you know, quick to dismiss and deny that racism even exists. It's scary sometimes.

chris time steele 25:58

I think you made a great point of many awesome points, that just having an anti racist workshop, even if it's not being lived up to it lays this great foundation for it to be called out and put back into place, when it's not being used correctly. By as you said, these students who seeds were planted in optimism of this?

Felicia Rose Chavez 26:20

Absolutely, I do a facilitation called self advocacy for students. And that's my favorite one to do. Because it's, it's how to hold one another as peers accountable and how to hold our educators accountable. Every time I talk to educators, I say you need to explicitly say it. I teach an anti racist writing workshop, I teach an anti racist econ class, I teach an anti racist history class, like, How can you be so explicit, so as to empower your students to hold you accountable, right, because if you just come out and say it, now you've got to follow through. And, and I want all of our young people to be able to exercise their voices in that way, where they were their reminders, constant reminders to one another, and to their, to their teachers, that they deserve better.

chris time steele 27:17

I also loved throughout this book that you call out gatekeeping even with, not just within academia, but within these writing groups that these workshops, there's often a lot of gatekeeping that goes on, and I like the you talk about gaslighting, and also the importance of language, all these different things that really cause so much violence, and how you call out words like literary and classical, which are another synonyms for gatekeeper. And I just really love that you I just wanted to highlight that this is so important what you bring out. And when I was teaching political science and history, this was something I was trying to change in my department to stop using words like slave and using enslaved, I had a big fight with my department when I tried to get rid of a Pearson textbook, and try to add Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, The People's Indigenous History of the US.

Felicia Rose Chavez 28:14

Wow, that was a fight?

chris time steele 28:16

Yeah, then they told me because I didn't have a PhD. I didn't know about scholarship, that the book was against America and all kinds of things is so horribly racist things and it really reminded me of your story on Shakespeare, but not being a play that was highlighted for just not one time, which became an outrage.

Felicia Rose Chavez 28:37

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just just earlier today I, a board member at the creative writing studies organization, I just joined, and they put out a call for proposals for conference panels. And I just read the call and noted language in there, like, you know, you must have, you must cite other sources, scholarly sources that support this work, you know, this, this is the same old rhetoric that that we offer one another to maintain this, this domination over who gets the control of the narrative, right. And to me, that's no different from our officers saying, you know, there was a meme that I posted, you know, it's a package of Skittles, it's a gunm a cell phone, it's a gun, a sandwich, it's a gun and then a taser? Oh, no. Right. I got confused. I didn't have you know, a gun is a taser like it's, it's control of the narrative. So, so it extends across our culture. It's not just within academia, but it is shameful, how we use that as as a standard to enforce white supremacy without having to use those words.

chris time steele 29:56

Definitely. Thank you. This is probably my last question, I want to be mindful of your time, along with your amazing book which I have already recommended it to so many people, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, I'd like to talk about your other writings as well. And I love Femme Fatal. the great frat boy in the sky, your other writings, how they deal with a field to deal with a lot of grief, Anatomy of a Life is one, the Mindful Birthing. I love that one. I was wondering if you could talk about the piece Memory Loop, which I found extremely personal and powerful and vulnerable. Wondering if you could talk about the process for this piece of was it therapeutic to write? Did it reopen wounds? Or did it help to heal wounds? Or was it a combination?

Felicia Rose Chavez 30:49

That's That's the one. I feel like all the other writing was just practice, right. I mean, it was just fun. Well, not always fun. But but more experiments. You know, I wanted to try different things with my writing. But that was the very first piece I ever wrote. I taught writing for many years as a way of supporting myself. And I taught writing because I was such an avid reader. And so I think the two go hand in hand and in that I was able to share strategies that appealed to me, as a reader, and relay that but not necessarily coming from a place of a writer speaking to another writer, I thought of myself as a teacher for so many years. And it took needing to relocate to Albuquerque, from Chicago, to go back home and serve as a caretaker, to my parents, my dad specifically, that motivated me to say, well, I'll try. I'll try graduate school, I'll try a writing program, let me dedicate some time to writing. So I showed up for a two week period, I showed up every day, a little bit early to work. And I wrote, you know, maybe 20-30 minutes per day in my little cubicle. And I would write and cry and write and cry. And what I created, I didn't edit I just sent out. And that was the very early version of memory loop. It took me between 10 and 12 years to return to that piece over and over and over again, I did so many different versions of that piece. I mean, the bones are still the same, but I tried reordering it, retitling it, like I mean, I just just adding a ton of research, taking it out. It was the, it never felt right. And once I achieved the draft the current draft, I thought I just knew it. It's like the body knows. It just I just knew it was almost like a sigh of relief. Like I finally did it. And it was, I think, transitioning from this is what happened to me, right, which I think is what we all come to the page as an act of like, release, right, this is what happened to me, I was witness to this, then, you know, this is, let me try to get inside the head of my mother who had experienced great depression. And it's kind of a stunning, shocking depression, which felt out of nowhere, when in truth was years long in the making, once I stepped out of her experience and into my own and really owned my own my own actions, like I'm complicit in this story, I'm not just there watching it happen. I'm involved, and I need to point the finger at myself as well, it needs to be, you know, like, it needed to be way more complicated than I was initially prepared to make it because I had to, I had to process it first. So to make something of it took many, many years. And it taught me something I learned about myself in writing that and coming to terms with my own guilt, as a you know, a participant in in the story. And in that in that few years, you know, 10, 5 years of my mom's life. And I'm really grateful that I didn't settle for that first draft. I'm really grateful that I did that work and went back again and again. Because I think that I needed to teach myself something in that writing.

chris time steele 34:22

Wow, thanks for sharing that process it's such a powerful piece, you switch from narrative so smoothly. You know, some writers have to use the three stars to show we can do the scene as a new narrative. And then your piece went to so many different avenues that was just so powerful. Thank you for explaining that process. Thank you for listening to this episode of the time talks podcast. Please check out some other shows on the Channel Zero Network. Thanks to Awareness for the music, please support his music on Bandcamp and please pick up Felicia Rose Chavez's his book out on Haymarket, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, and check out her other writings. I'll link them in the show notes. See you all next time and free Palestine.

#anti racism #channel zero network #Haymarket Books #patriarchy

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miseriathome · 6 years

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Nah, queer theory is very much actively pushed by academics, who are people with real power over others - maybe not as much as some other category of people, but don't try and pretend that tenured faculty are weak and powerless outsiders. Besides that ... I can't dissuade you from your choice of ideology, but ime it was made very clear that "queer" was Not For Me, and I'm ostensibly one of those multiply-marginalized people who were supposed to find it liberatory.

[ presumably the same anon as this one ]

If your life experience doesn’t lead you to feel swayed by the really cool work that queer theorists are doing, then… whatever. I don’t feel particularly swayed by theoretical physics. But as somebody who is multiply-marginalized (aren’t we all?) who actually loves social theory, I’m still going to use my own blog as a platform to talk about it:

I don’t think you understand how broad the field of sociology is. Tenured sociology professors teach a whole broad range of topics. You know what tenured professors’ sociology classes really are? History, historical theory (pure theory, no applications), psychology, anthropology, economics, a lot more history, political science, and methodology courses. Things I’ve learned from tenured sociology professors: the history of capitalism as it developed from feudalism; Marx/Weber/Durkheim (which were beaten to death in every. single. course) ; the history of labor unions; pseudopsychology; a lot of statistics about population distributions based on things like age and sex; ethnographies about big industries; the history of factories; critical race/class/gender theory in the abstract; some weird shit about the function of sports in society, fuck if I know; the American Dream across time; modern cultural differences around the globe; political processes for passing legislation; fucking pussy hats, everyone couldn’t stop talking about the goddamn pussy hats; classifications of professions; lots of American history.

Social theory, economics, psychology, anthropology, political science, etc all are valid approaches to sociology. But being a tenured professor means being stuck in a niche all your life, never bothering to reach out of your own area of expertise. And you know what kinds of people have had a much more difficult time entering the present day class of tenured professors? People of color, disabled folks, queer people. You know, people who like queer theory. And research about minority issues doesn’t get funded as much as broader, “more applicable” research does., which makes it harder to enter academic fields and research positions if that’s your specialty.

You have to realize that people who are currently tenured professors have followed a career path to get there over the past 10+ years (if they’re even a newly tenured professor), and that’s in light of the changing political climate of that time which–as you go backwards to their early college days–would get more and more socially conservative, making it harder to have had that career path. Then there’s the fact that in a given sociology department at any university, there’s only so many professors that can specialize in identity politics, narrowing the potential for university-level teaching positions even further. Finally, a lot of queer theorists aren’t… even… sociologists? Like I said before, queer theorists are ordinary people who write about their lives and experiences, who sometimes come from other backgrounds like political science/anthropology/human rights and then sort of get swallowed into academic sociological queer theory. So you don’t have to have any specific credentials to write cornerstone pieces of queer literature, but you do have to have them to teach in a university, and thus I don’t think it’s very fair to assume that queer theorists are entering universities in hoards to push their queer agenda. (Also, colleges don’t really want to hire people who are too ~radical~ because of controversy–even liberal colleges.)

Or, if you’re trying to imply that the few professors who do teach queer theory are intentionally pushing it as much as possible… it’s probably because it’s such a relatively new, unexplored, and underrated area that deserves attention? I don’t see how gender/sexuality professors are any different in that respect than every other professor who gets super enthusiastic about their own research.

The people I know who teach queer theory are grad students, aka they aren’t tenured?? I mean I’ll give you some benefit of the doubt if you mean women’s gender/sexuality studies professors, since my avenue is sociology, but even then. And you totally can’t act like grad students have power, given how poor and exploited they are and how easily they can be dismissed for toeing a line at their institution.

I legitimately do not think professors are people with any significant amount of power over others–especially not broad social power a a class. Like, there is soooooooo much social theory that could go into breaking down this ask. I literally just pulled up my class notes on the social distinction of professions. It’s the nature of the public to try to deprofessionalize certain skills and knowledge bases, and university professors are frequently attacked in this regard.

I also established already that most queer theorists aren’t actually people who have fulfilled an academically-acceptable career in queer theory. Faculty are the people who synthesize documents and structure syllibi around them in order to teach them effectively. The people who are “pushing” queer theory (still unfortunate rhetoric with queerphobic implications) are queer people. Non-professor queer people. Many of whom are multiply-marginalized and find writing about their lives liberatory. You’re getting uncomfortably close to “marginalized people actually have tone of power” conspiracy logic. It’s a lot simpler than all of that. Professor teach queer theory because a good education requires a broad representation of multiple sides, and queer theory is just another lens, just like neocolonialism, neoliberalism, neo-Marxism, and critical race/class/gender theory are. Like, my social theory textbook has one section about queer theory (which is literally only about Judith Butler, actually) which is only one part of one chapter on postmodernism.

But like… aside all of that, most theory–except maybe music theory, because fuck that shit–is descriptive. Theory is developed through observations and life experiences and quantitative/ethnographic research. If you read prominent works within queer theory, they’re either what are essentially memoirs/opinion pieces, argumentative essays that build off the work on philosophy-style theorists, or published, peer-reviewed studies. And considering the fact that those things are present in all branches of sociological theory, I don’t think you can be against that, either.

I definitely gave myself a headache trying to condense all of the things I’m trying to think of, and I’ve been chipping away at this ask for multiple hours. The bigger fact is that one person sending me super short, super vague anons is not a good start to a productive and meaningful conversation, because I’m just grasping at straws trying to make inferences about what’s really being conveyed. This might be an inadequate job but it’s a starting point and is hopefully broad enough that it hits on some meaningful points.

Also, anybody who doesn’t find the word queer liberatory but still calls themselves queer should really ask themselves why they want to be called queer in the first place when it’s a choice.

#anon #ask #queer theory #reply #I...?#long post #academia

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kitt-andrea · 5 years

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A prayer for pockets

Dear you Who lives in this world I have something to share Please hear my

Inside this hellish world Made to break us I have found me I have found mine

When I let myself break And cry aloud Never hidden But publicly When I know I deserve better And so does everyone else Together

I have learned to use my voice Become intimate with its cadence Whispered or projected I have a voice

I can tell you now that I am Ky I am a multitude and I am beautiful Because I write poetry To make art out of an ache Because when I shout University House will shake Because I am joyfully loud When I call and respond with a crowd

Me and mine are fighters They have embraced welcomed educated me in the ways Of survival as struggle And struggle as a promise That things don't have to be like this Because something inside always knows You deserve better We deserve better

As we struggle for better My friendly fighters are beautifully alive Some are soft and bake cookies They nourish us Some write words like a knife But hold you when they speak Some are simply there Always there no matter what Some are angry and tired And show you how to just have fun Some know the unspoken things So to trusted ones in secret rooms they Explain how to report, or get support, or comport Yourself in a sticky situation

There are pockets In which heaven hides Full of love Voices heard Decisions made radically At the root Democratically Unlinked from capital Power made visible and challenged Liberatory for all oppressed people Or at least it’s trying It isn’t perfect But it’s trying We’re trying

You can find heaven If you know what to search for And heaven trusts you To love To love enough to be kind To love enough to build something better To love enough to join the fight

Yes, this is hell But my friends are in it with me Even some of my academics too But we’re making moves Creating spaces, seeking changes For this hell to be a little bit more heavenly Maybe one day we’ll remake the whole place Change every system all the structures I’m sceptical but can hope

I can hope but don't bullshit to me So tell me Tell me we’re not free And you don't know if we'll ever be But we'll try our best Tell me you believe we should be free Tell me we'll fight together to be free And maybe in your actions I can let myself believe you Tell me that we must act as if we are free And maybe oh gods maybe Because of us One day someone can be free

Until then Even in the most hellish of places I promise you My dear you There are pockets Of life Real life Consider me a flare Transient Not the main event But bright and bold enough Calling you home to a heaven

Tell me you've dared to dream We can be free

May 2019

#reinventing education #collective power #solidarity #warwick for free education

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witchcraftnow · 7 years

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I don’t know, sir. Was it Molotov?

This was going to become another abandoned project. Not in totality, the seeds of it would have been scattered on, but this particular iteration of what I intended to do: Go through The Invisibles issue by issue and write about it from the perspective of a practicing witch, wasn’t going to happen. But I found spontaneous cause to re-read issue #1, and it’s buzzing with such synchronicity for me at this moment that I think this is actually going to happen. Obviously, SPOILERS if you haven’t read the series, definitely for the issue currently being discussed, and possibly for the series as a whole, but I will try to preserve the overarching Mystery of the series as much as possible and only discuss what is necessary and vital for my own ongoing practice. "And so we return and begin again.” We open with pyramids and scarabs; life, death, and rebirth. And Molotov cocktails. This won’t be a close reading but a series of impressions and significances. We begin with this theme of returning, and just as I’m returning to read this, almost every “good guy” character in the first issue is in some state of time displacement. Some of this is only cryptic suggestion at this point, to be explored later (King Mob looks pretty young, how can he be “the same today” as in 1924). But the protagonist of this arc, Dane McGowan, classic “troubled youth” sees ghosts, sees “DEAD BEATLE$” Oh. Beatles, I just got that, another scarab reference. Dead Beatles, deadbeats, death and rebirth and “godhead made of living music.” This is where Grant Morrison’s magical author avatar, his “fiction suit,” does his somewhat embarrassing but even now somewhat captivating (to me anyway) “John Lennon summoning.” You can find the result of that ritual here, at a panel with Gerard Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP22pAOVlVI This brings up two important points. One, so much of this series is about fame and aspiration, something I’ve found not to be the false consciousness or debased distraction it often assumed to be in many “spiritual” or leftist circles. Fame is a key aspect of Glamour, something any magician who uses smoke and mirrors to reach other worlds must grapple with.

The big ol’ omnibus I have of The Invisibles, released near the end of the world in 2012, opens with an introduction from Gerard Way. He describes meeting Grant Morrison at the DC Comics offices and being blown away with an immediate sense of: HOLY SHIT IT’S KING MOB!!! But by now, from his tenure in My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way is more famous than Grant Morrison has ever been, and the moment described in the introduction is echoed (perhaps more profanely, but no less powerful for it) in the above video when Grant Morrison says, “Look, Gerard Way’s getting my guitar!” When Dane McGowan sees his ghosts of “Dead Beatles,” Stuart Sutcliffe is morosely discussing leaving the band, to which John Lennon replies, “I don’t know why you’re going on about death, anyway, you’re only leaving a *band*, Stu. It’s not the end of the fucking world.” But Stuart Sutcliffe would die a few years later. And from Dane’s perspective, he’s also right to say, “Maybe we *are* dead, John. We could be dead and not know it.” The Invisibles is filled with these little moments, these nexuses in time where ships pass each other in the night, where one party “misses the boat,” and the other rides off for glory. And usually at some other moment, those fortunes reverse. Here at the crossroads. This is also where Dane re-meets his childhood imaginary friend. And it’s moments like the one described above, combined with this connection to childhood, combined with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s conviction that he as an octogenarian can heal his childhood self through his magical cinematic memoirs... that has made me think I might be able to do the same thing, and attempt time travel. Point two of the aforementioned duo: One of the reasons the John Lennon ritual is a bit embarrassing is that John Lennon was such a little shit, abusive, misogynistic, racist; contrary to the glamour he’s been given as an avatar of love. And at that, the Beatles, while significant, are pretty monumentally overrated in the big scheme of things. But at this point in the timeline, I reflect upon how much I love and find solace in the work of particular artists inspired by the Beatles (most significantly Grant Morrison and Julie Taymor), even if the position of the Beatles themselves in the canon is a bit grating at best, and counter-revolutionary at worst. And I think about a connection I didn’t think to make upon first read-through: What if Dane McGowan is intended as some kind of rebirth of John Lennon? A do-over. A chance to make the real person more like the avatar. Dane is kind of a little shit at the start of the story, and pointedly so. Nowhere near as horrific as some of the stories about John Lennon (he is still a kid at this point, after all), but certainly misogynistic and transphobic. He has to unlearn these patterns, and ultimately die as the old Dane, to progress as a magician, to become Invisible. This is one of the core arcs of the series overall. A child of poverty and neglect who becomes a Buddha. Through, I would argue, something quite similar to vanguardism. The melancholy with which the series reflects upon the various missed opportunities for a more liberatory history is countered by a bright, powerful, fearless joy that in moments is utterly convincing: time travel is possible, those lost histories can be reborn. Those alternate universes still exist in latent form, and can be brought to bear upon the present, can be made to shape Reality. Fitting then, that the issue also opens with a reflection on unity and division within the Left, Dane’s teacher explains: “We’re going to be looking at the ways in which the early links between communist theory and other radical political movements were *severed* following the revolution.” As a Marxist-Leninist myself, I may have a different perspective on that severance than some of my anarchists friends, but I think we’d agree that the Left is in many ways lesser for it. I think the USSR was vitally necessary for global liberation, and the world would be a hell of a lot worse off without it, but that doesn’t mean that the different sides of the various schisms within the Left have nothing to learn from each other. Maybe it’s time to crack open that old Bread book after all. And it’s so interesting that a Kropotkin reference should play such a key role in this issue. I had just been looking him up earlier today after witnessing a Facebook argument between Marxists and anarchists where both sides were accusing each other of not being sufficiently materialistic. And Marxism has materially *worked*. But there is always more material to be found in our failed attempts, its potential coiled tight and ready be let loose on the world. We should be realistic about our current dialectic, but it is possible, through science and magic, to travel to worlds outside it. And to bring something back. I want to conclude with a reflection on a failed effort of mine. For a long time, when I was still a practicing Buddhist, I had planned on writing and directing an ongoing film series called American Kensho. Only the first one was ever completed. I have been planning for a while on finally making a link to it public, with a message to collaborators and crowdfunding patrons about how we might reward their patience on years-delayed rewards, given the radical change in direction of my life and practice. I’m not a Buddhist anymore, though I know that path works very well for countless people around the world. And some of them may even be able to render it compatible with witchcraft. But I could not, and the Devil won out in the end. As such, the ideology of the film is no longer exactly what I’d ascribe to. I’d no longer be interested in associating the Devil with the various markers of oppression the villains in this film obviously embody, nor would it be acceptable to have only the bad guys speak in tongues. But it’s still a film I’m very proud of, and there are seeds of what I would become within it. Apple seeds perhaps, because what’s making me post this film first here rather than in that more sober announcement is the character of Julia, and striking parallels to the introduction of Ragged Robin in The Invisibles. Julia (in a comic shop no less) similarly muses on apples and Eve. And just as one of my favorite scenes in the film involves Julia reading Tarot, we first meet Ragged Robin pulling the Moon card (in a setting I can’t help let remind me of several of the locations in our film). But the card is reversed. While Julia seems to deeply believe in the Tarot, uses it urgently, Ragged Robin is listless and “thinks it’s bullshit.” While Julia, “rather thinks Eve had it right,” Ragged Robin “isn’t going to fall for that one.” But she takes the apple anyway. And this would make King Mob, who offers the apple, the Devil. “Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

https://vimeo.com/cell23/manifestdestiny

#the invisibles #witchcraft #marxism #devil

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moesunamigendertheory-blog · 7 years

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Final Reflection

My initial purpose for taking this class was to become more responsible with the power that I have as a would-be Andover graduate, a Japanese student studying in America, and a woman who loves technology. I felt insecure that my feminist principles were not grounded or informed enough. I could not answer if someone asked, “What is gender?” This knowledge seemed crucial as I navigate different manifestations of feminism after Andover, where I may not be surrounded by strong role models who speak for me. As a woman in STEM, feminism inevitably follows me, a brand of Sheryl-Sandberg feminism that is made necessary by trendiness, class, and capitalism — who does this feminism benefit? What does it bring that is new? In Japan, the word “feminism” has a different dictionary definition; how could I communicate the principles of feminism using different terminology? After taking this class, I wanted enough background in gender theory that I may be able to explain it and show why it matters, and how it is grounded in truth, even to people whose only encounter with feminism has been neoliberal or aggressive.

One theme that has left the strongest impression on me from this class is the constructed-ness of sexuality and gender. I learned to view gender and sexuality, not as timeless essences of human nature, but rather a description of a process of individual and societal habituation. This understanding began to dawn on me during Mr. Khactu’s class and the cartoon that explained Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity in simple terms. It surprised me how smoothly this theory fit into my own understanding of Buddhist teachings, which I learned about in the Global Buddhisms class in the Winter. Gender is not intrinsic to human nature but is a product of countless interactions of the past and present, which all inform ideas of what gender is, and they have been constructed around two poles of masculinity and femininity, according to a power matrix that aligns sexuality, sex, and gender. I believe one of the reasons why this theory has become so important to me is the universal responsibility it places on each of us to deconstruct and reconstruct concepts of gender and sexuality so that it can include more people. It is because that gender and sexuality are constructed that oppressive systems are not permanent, and can be affected by an individual so they can, one day, transform. As gender changes from moment to moment, we are called to be mindful of the consequences of our actions. As Audre Lorde says in “Uses of the Erotic,“ as women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.”

I had set three goals at the beginning of the term (below), which connect with the goal above. As the term progressed I realized that these goals interacted with the other classes I took: specifically, a Buddhism semi-IP, Nonviolence and Social Change, and Film Photography.

Understand the importance of activism and praxis within the context of the feminist movement and identify possible avenues for their own activist application of learned concepts.

Question perceived systems of privilege and hierarchy as they relate to their own experience and that of others (moving from self-based to empathy-based motivations)

Write both reflectively and analytically about the course materials.

The first goal especially connected with my Nonviolence class and Film Photography. I explored activism primarily through the function of Love, an idea brought forth by Gandhi as the most revolutionary and radical force. Love reveals Truth, for the universal sort of love — agape —seeks something that is inclusive and harmonious with all of mankind, which is the Absolute Truth. And as we discussed the Othering of discourse via Foucault, the manipulation of Love to exchange women, or whether Love required domination through Beyoncé’s Lemonade, I became convinced with every lesson that what I had wanted to do as an activist was to Love, and to stay firm to Truth, being loyal not to my immediate self but to the whole humanity. In Lorde’s words this may be an “erotic moment” — erotic because it is respectful of whole humanity, and not pornographic because it comes at the expense of another. It means expanding Realness, to borrow Butler’s language.

This term was an experiment in practicing such Love. What I found hindered my ability to Love was communication of my ideas to people who do not share the same viewpoints as I do, and I saw that this problem was shared by others, too. As I tried to communicate with my parents — with whom I have a tumultuous relationship — I felt anger, vengeance, despair, numbness. What helped me was expanding Love towards others, which brings me to my second goal. What I discovered with empathy-based motivation is that this does not equal agreement — which surprised me, since almost all of my close relationships seem to center on agreement and validation. It means agreeing with what is Real. Throughout the Colloquium, I paid attention to blackness and queerness, two facets of identity that I do not identify with. I first noticed how early gender theory left out discussion of black women, for instance, in discussions of the masculine gaze in Hollywood films. Reading bell hooks and contemporary feminist critics’ dialogue about Beyoncé’s Lemonade videos taught me the multiplicity of black feminist dialogue, of generational differences, and multiple perspectives on sex positivity in the backdrop of hypersexualization of black women’s bodies: how do you proceed? And the hypersexualization of black women in media especially resonated with Malika and Madison’s project on how black women navigate Andover’s hook-up culture, and where such validation can be found. Previous to this class, I also had not known that black male artists have a limited creative expression of hypermasculinity, one which is then set as an archetype of “blackness” that is consumed to personify white struggle.

I hope that Piper’s and my photography series, Sexist Alphabets and Metaphors respectively, can introduce students at Phillips Academy to the elasticity of gender and sexuality. By showing how gender theory and queer theory is liberatory and resists solidification, it counters the narrative of CAMD and student activists as “PC police,” enforcers of a rigid set of codes.

Moreover, I hope that Phillips Academy students may see that feminism is grounded in truth, not simply a mindless performance of East Coast intellectual liberalism, or a political philosophy to adopt in order to appear to be a “good person.” There is an idea that social justice is a separate issue from education, that the former is from an idealistic, impractical realm that is incompatible with the rationality of the real world. In other words, social justice is accused of being a lofty performance, a delusion, a daydream. Yet, this is a tactic that is generally used to silence marginalized people who advocate for themselves. For instance, Zoe Sotille’s Brace Presentation brought up an insightful point on how women who seek help for mental health are dismissed for “acting.” In this regard, Theory may be a better communicator to those not won over by moral appeal than mass-consumed, popular feminism. The logical and even scientific arguments for how sexism operates can invite Phillips Academy students to take feminism seriously as an intellectual pursuit and to add to it critically, constructively, and responsibly. (Just as History 300 classes prove that racism is more than a moral issue: by learning about exploitative and neglectful legislation, one learns that it is a systemic and societal injustice that has benefited whites at the expense of African Americans.)

My partner for the final project, Piper, inspired me to be positive, critical, constantly amazed, and focused on the intention behind an action. Her love of learning, questioning, and efforts to be intersectional in her feminism was inspiring to me, and I was in especial awe of what a great writer she was. I loved being able to take two classes — Film Photography and the Gender Colloquium — with her. Our photography series were complementary, and hers pushed me to make a greater effort connecting my photographs to practical, relevant issues at Andover.

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neo-losangeles · 7 years

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bell hooks on lemonade

Moving Beyond Pain

bell hooks InstituteMay 9, 2016 Fresh lemonade is my drink of choice. In my small Kentucky town, beautiful black, brown, and white girls set up their lemonade stands and practice the art of money making—it’s business. As a grown black woman who believes in the manifesto “Girl, get your money straight” my first response to Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade, was WOW—this is the business of capitalist money making at its best.

Viewers who like to suggest Lemonade was created solely or primarily for black female audiences are missing the point. Commodities, irrespective of their subject matter, are made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers. Beyoncé’s audience is the world and that world of business and money-making has no color.

What makes this production—this commodity—daring is its subject matter. Obviously Lemonade positively exploits images of black female bodies—placing them at the center, making them the norm. In this visual narrative, there are diverse representations (black female bodies come in all sizes, shapes, and textures with all manner of big hair). Portraits of ordinary everyday black women are spotlighted, poised as though they are royalty. The unnamed, unidentified mothers of murdered young black males are each given pride of place. Real life images of ordinary, overweight not dressed up bodies are placed within a visual backdrop that includes stylized, choreographed, fashion plate fantasy representations. Despite all the glamorous showcasing of Deep South antebellum fashion, when the show begins Beyoncé as star appears in sporty casual clothing, the controversial hoodie. Concurrently, the scantily-clothed dancing image of athlete Serena Williams also evokes sportswear. (Speaking of commodification, in the real life frame Beyoncé’s new line of sportswear, Ivy Park, is in the process of being marketed right now).

Lemonade offers viewers a visual extravaganza—a display of black female bodies that transgresses all boundaries. It’s all about the body, and the body as commodity. This is certainly not radical or revolutionary. From slavery to the present day, black female bodies, clothed and unclothed, have been bought and sold. What makes this commodification different in Lemonade is intent; its purpose is to seduce, celebrate, and delight—to challenge the ongoing present day devaluation and dehumanization of the black female body. Throughout Lemonade the black female body is utterly-aestheticized—its beauty a powerful in your face confrontation. This is no new offering. Images like these were first seen in Julie Dash’s groundbreaking film Daughters of the Dust shot by the brilliant cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Many of the black and white still images of women and nature are reminiscent of the transformative and innovative contemporary photography of Carrie Mae Weems. She has continually offered decolonized radical revisioning of the black female body.

It is the broad scope of Lemonade’s visual landscape that makes it so distinctive—the construction of a powerfully symbolic black female sisterhood that resists invisibility, that refuses to be silent. This in and of itself is no small feat—it shifts the gaze of white mainstream culture. It challenges us all to look anew, to radically revision how we see the black female body. However, this radical repositioning of black female images does not truly overshadow or change conventional sexist constructions of black female identity.

Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer multidimensional images of black female life, much of the album stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim. Although based on the real-life experience of Beyoncé, Lemonade is a fantasy fictional narrative with Beyoncé starring as the lead character. This work begins with a story of pain and betrayal highlighting the trauma it produces. The story is as old as the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny” (“he was my man alright, but he done me wrong”). Like the fictional Frankie, Beyoncé’s character responds to her man’s betrayal with rage. She wreaks violence. And even though the father in the song “Daddy’s Lessons” gives her a rifle warning her about men, she does not shoot her man. She dons a magnificently designed golden yellow gown, boldly struts through the street with baseball bat in hand, randomly smashing cars. In this scene, the goddess-like character of Beyoncé is sexualized along with her acts of emotional violence, like Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” she destroys with no shame. Among the many mixed messages embedded in Lemonade is this celebration of rage. Smug and smiling in her golden garb, Beyoncé is the embodiment of a fantastical female power, which is just that—pure fantasy. Images of female violence undercut a central message embedded in Lemonade that violence in all its forms, especially the violence of lies and betrayal, hurts.

Contrary to misguided notions of gender equality, women do not and will not seize power and create self-love and self-esteem through violent acts. Female violence is no more liberatory than male violence. And when violence is made to look sexy and eroticized, as in the Lemonade sexy-dress street scene, it does not serve to undercut the prevailing cultural sentiment that it is acceptable to use violence to reinforce domination, especially in relations between men and women. Violence does not create positive change.

Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators make use of the powerful voice and words of Malcolm X to emphasize the lack of respect for black womanhood, simply showcasing beautiful black bodies does not create a just culture of optimal well being where black females can become fully self-actualized and be truly respected.

Honoring the self, loving our bodies, is an appropriate stage in the construction of healthy self-esteem. This aspect of Lemonade is affirming. Certainly, to witness Miss Hattie, the 90-year-old grandmother of Jay-Z, give her personal testimony that she has survived by taking the lemons life handed her and making lemonade is awesome. All the references to honoring our ancestors and elders in Lemonade inspire. However, concluding this narrative of hurt and betrayal with caring images of family and home do not serve as adequate ways to reconcile and heal trauma.

Concurrently, in the world of art-making, a black female creator as powerfully placed as Beyoncé can both create images and present viewers with her own interpretation of what those images mean. However, her interpretation cannot stand as truth. For example, Beyoncé uses her non-fictional voice and persona to claim feminism, even to claim, as she does in a recent issue of Elle magazine, “to give clarity to the true meaning” of the term, but her construction of feminism cannot be trusted. Her vision of feminism does not call for an end to patriarchal domination. It’s all about insisting on equal rights for men and women. In the world of fantasy feminism, there are no class, sex, and race hierarchies that breakdown simplified categories of women and men, no call to challenge and change systems of domination, no emphasis on intersectionality. In such a simplified worldview, women gaining the freedom to be like men can be seen as powerful. But it is a false construction of power as so many men, especially black men, do not possess actual power. And indeed, it is clear that black male cruelty and violence towards black women is a direct outcome of patriarchal exploitation and oppression.

In her fictive world, Beyoncé can name black female pain, poignantly articulated by the passionate poetry of Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, and move through stages evoked by printed words: Intuition, Denial, Forgiveness, Hope, Reconciliation. In this fictive world, black female emotional pain can be exposed and revealed. It can be given voice: this is a vital and essential stage of freedom struggle, but it does not bring exploitation and domination to an end. No matter how hard women in relationships with patriarchal men work for change, forgive, and reconcile, men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end. We see no hint of this in Lemonade. If change is not mutual then black female emotional hurt can be voiced, but the reality of men inflicting emotional pain will still continue (can we really trust the caring images of Jay Z which conclude this narrative).

It is only as black women and all women resist patriarchal romanticization of domination in relationships can a healthy self-love emerge that allows every black female, and all females, to refuse to be a victim. Ultimately Lemonade glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction. It does not resolve. As Beyoncé proudly proclaims in the powerful anthem “Freedom”: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner-strength to pull myself up.” To truly be free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal well-being and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.

--bell hooks

http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain

#important #a #bell hooks

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years

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The Cops In Our Heads: Some thoughts on anarchy and morality

In my travels over the past several months, I have talked with many anarchists who conceive of anarchy as a moral principle. Some go so far as to speak of anarchy as though it were a deity to whom they had given themselves—reinforcing my feeling that those who really want to experience anarchy may need to divorce themselves from anarchism.

The most frequent of the moral conceptions of anarchy I heard defined anarchy as a principled refusal to use force to impose one’s will on others. This conception has implications which I cannot accept. It implies that domination is mainly a matter of personal moral decisions rather than of social roles and relationships, that all of us are equally in a position to exercise domination and that we need to exercise self-discipline to prevent ourselves from doing so. If domination is a matter of social roles and social relationships, this moral principle is utterly absurd, being nothing more than a way of separating the politically correct (the elect) from the politically incorrect (the damned). This definition of anarchy places anarchic rebels in a position of even greater weakness in an already lopsided struggle against authority. All forms of violence against people or property, general strikes, theft and even such tame activities as civil disobedience constitute a use of force to impose one’s will. To refuse to use force to impose one’s will is to become totally passive—to become a slave. This conception of anarchy makes it a rule to control our lives, and that is an oxymoron.

The attempt to make a moral principle of anarchy distorts its real significance. Anarchy describes a particular type of situation, one in which either authority does not exist or its power to control is negated. Such a situation guarantees nothing—not even the continued existence of that situation, but it does open up the possibility for each of us to start creating our lives for ourselves in terms of our own desires and passions rather than in terms of social roles and the demands of social order. Anarchy is not the goal of revolution; it is the situation which makes the only type of revolution that interests me possible —an uprising of individuals to create their lives for themselves and destroy what stands in their way. It is a situation free of any moral implications, presenting to each of us the amoral challenge to live our lives without constraints.

I don’t wish to deal with the concept of the “commonality of all people” in this article: My present point is that whatever morality is based upon, it always stands outside of and above the living individual. Whether the basis or morality is god, patriotism, common humanity, production needs, natural law, “the Earth,” anarchy, or even “the individual” as a principle, it is always an abstract ideal that rules over US. Morality is a form of authority and will be undermined by an anarchic situation as much as any other authority if that situation is to last.

Morality and judgment go hand in hand. Criticism—even harsh, cruel criticism—is essential to honing our rebellious analysis and practice, but judgment needs to be utterly eradicated. Judgment categorizes people as guilty or not guilty—and guilt is one of the most powerful weapons of repression. When we judge and condemn ourselves or anyone else, we are suppressing rebellion—that is the purpose of guilt. (This does not mean that we “shouldn’t” hate, or wish to kill anyone—it would be absurd to create an “amoral” morality, but our hatred needs to be recognized as a personal passion and not defined in moral terms.) Radical critique grows from the real experiences, activities, passions and desires of individuals and aims at liberating rebelliousness. Judgment springs from principles and ideals that stand above us; it aims at enslaving us to those ideals. Where anarchic situations have arisen, judgment has often temporarily disappeared, freeing people of guilt— as in certain riots where people of all sorts looted together in a spirit of joy in spite of having been taught all of their lives to respect property. Morality requires guilt; freedom requires the elimination of guilt.

A dadaist once said, “Being governed by morals... has made it impossible for us to be anything other than passive toward the policeman; this is the source of our slavery.” Certainly, morality is a source of passivity. I have heard of several situations in which fairly large-scale anarchic situations started to develop and have experienced minor ones, but in each of these situations, the energy dissipated and most participants returned to the non-lives they’d lived before the uprisings. These events show that, in spite of the extent to which social control permeates all of our waking (and much of our sleeping) lives, we can break out. But the cops in our heads—the morality, guilt and fear—have to be dealt with. Every moral system, no matter what claims it makes to the contrary, places limits on the possibilities available to us, constraints upon our desires; and these limits are not based on our actual capabilities, but on abstract ideas that keep us from exploring the full extent of our capabilities. When anarchic situations have arisen in the past, the cops in peoples’ heads—the ingrained fear, morality and guilt—have frightened people, keeping them tame enough to retreat back into the safety of their cages, and the anarchic situation disappeared.

This is significant because anarchic situations don’t just pop out of nowhere—they spring from the activities of people frustrated with their lives. It is possible for each of us at any moment to create such a situation. Often this would be tactically foolish, but the possibility is there. Yet we all seem to wait patiently for anarchic situations to drop from the sky— and when they do explode forth, we can’t keep them going. Even those of us who have consciously rejected morality find ourselves hesitating, stopping to examine each action, fearing the cops even when there are no external cops around. Morality, guilt and fear of condemnation act as cops in our heads, destroying our spontaneity, our wildness, our ability to live our lives to the full.

The cops in our heads will continue to suppress our rebelliousness until we learn to take risks. I don’t mean that we have to be stupid—jail is not an anarchic or liberatory situation, but without risk, there is no adventure, no life. Self-motivated activity—activity that springs from our passions and desires, not from attempts to conform to certain principles and ideals or to blend in to any group (including “anarchists”)—is what can create a situation of anarchy, what can open up a world of possibilities limited only by our capabilities. To learn to freely express our passions—a skill earned only by doing it—is essential. When we feel disgust, anger, joy, desire, sadness, love, hatred, we need to express them. It isn’t easy. More often than not, I find myself falling into the appropriate social role in situations where I want to express something different. I’ll go into a store feeling disgust for the whole process of economic relationships, and yet politely thank the clerk for putting me through just that process. Were I doing this consciously, as a cover for shoplifting; it would be fun, using my wits to get what I want; but it is an ingrained social response—a cop in my head. I am improving; but I have a hell of a long way to go. Increasingly, I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring about what others think of me. This is a self-motivated activity—the activity that springs from our passions and desires, from our suppressed imaginations, our unique creativity. Sure, following our subjectivity this way, living our lives for ourselves, can lead us to make mistakes, but never mistakes comparable to the mistake of accepting the zombie existence that obedience to authority, morality, rules or higher powers creates. Life without risks, without the possibility of mistakes, is no life at all. Only by taking the risk of defying all authority and living for ourselves will we ever live life to the full.

I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities so that I can create my life for myself—at every moment. This means breaking down all social roles and destroying all morality. When an anarchist or any other radical starts preaching their moral principles at me—whether non-coercion, deep ecology, communism, militantism or even ideologically-required “pleasure”—I hear a cop or a priest, and I have no desire to deal with people as cops or priests, except to defy them. I am struggling to create a situation in which I can live freely, being all that I desire to be, in a world of free individuals with whom I can relate in terms of our desires without constraints. I have enough cops in my head—as well as those out on the streets—to deal with without having to deal with the cops of “anarchist” or radical morality as well. Anarchy and morality are opposed to each other, and any effective opposition to authority will need to oppose morality and eradicate the cops in our heads.

#feral faun #anti civ #communism #anarchism #green anarchy #insurrectionary anarchism

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