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jakegrxz · 5 years

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Foregrounding confrontation

Confrontational and/or disruptive activism can often be feared or shamed, by both those on the right and left. But what if it’s a sign that something good, productive, and radical is happening?

Following a week of protest targeting London’s key infrastructure by Extinction Rebellion, the topic of disruptive direct action has been once again made the topic of national conversation. Putting aside the very real issues with XR’s politics and relationship to the police to one side (this is not that piece), their activity has at least represented some of the most sustained, organised and spectacular direct action seen in the UK for some time. Reactions have ranged from inspired to derogatory, to somewhere in between. A glimpse at this can be seen through The Guardian’s reporting on the 21st April, where a couple from St. Helens in Merseyside were interviewed who had travelled down for some bank holiday shopping:

““I agree with some of the points but I disagree with the methods,” Michelle said after a lengthy discussion with an activist, adding that the movement appeared quite London-centric. “It wouldn’t happen in St Helens,” added her partner.”

This is, of course, nothing new. We find the same reactions whenever there is a tube strike in London, or whenever any activist group takes direct action for any number of reasons. The invocation is made loud and clear: think about all the innocent people you are disrupting. You are causing needless harm. You are being rude and confrontational. You need be mature and sit around the table with those in power to make the change you want. In this vision of politics, political ideas can be divorced from the methods used to achieve them, as evidenced in the Guardian quote above. The political ideas aren’t the things that’re really engaged with or critiqued (indeed, they’re usually brushed aside: yes yes, we all want higher wages; yes, we all care about climate change); rather, it’s the disruptive and confrontational methods. It’s the textbook media/elite response to disruptive protest: focus on disruption or property damage to evacuate the event of all meaningful politics.

What’s concerning is that this objection isn’t even exclusively the property of the reactionary, conservative right – some leftists engage in it too, perhaps more subtly. Think about, for instance, some of the supposedly ‘radical’ lecturers in universities, who take pride in their ‘critical’ scholarship yet balk at the idea of actually taking direct action or standing up to university managers. Or some people in the Labour Party whose so-called socialist ‘credentials’ stem not from any serious radical praxis, but rather simply a position in a social network, a circle of friends masked by institutional rhetoric and elected positions. Time and again I have encountered people who consider themselves on the left, but feel uncomfortable and uneasy about being disruptive and confrontational to the point of actively stopping such action from happening.

There seems, then, to be a theoretical gulf between strategy and tactics on the left; leftists have the theories to critique the big picture (why capitalism is bad, why the gender binary is bad, etc.), but not the theories about tactics needed to actually intervene in this big picture. What I want to do in this piece, then, is to try and integrate those two theoretical strands. Rather than think political ideas/strategies and political methods/tactics apart, they need to be thought together. To do this, I centre the moment of confrontation in any direct action – the confrontation between you and a security guard, an angered commuter, an angered manager, a sexist male leftist, a racist white ally –and all the emotions (anger, anxiety, confusion, glee, sadness) that comes with. Rather than bemoaning these moments of confrontation, I instead try to critically value them, and see where that takes us. In other words, what if confrontation, far from being a negative sign in activism, is actually a sign that something good, productive, and radical is happening? This is the question that undergirds this piece.

Theorising confrontation

To begin we need to note the observation made by numerous cultural and social theorists as part of the recent “affective turn” in the arts and social sciences that emotions and feelings are not individualised phenomena. While mainstream discourses around wellbeing, mental health, self-care and happiness present emotions as coming from within our minds, as a problem for the rational liberal individual, these theorists have argued that while emotions or “affects” are of course instantiated at the levels of chemicals in the brain, they ultimately exist on the plane of social relations. We are always sad/happy/angry about something or other or for some reason or another; emotions thus involve directions and orientations towards some object. Our emotions are always related to something or other in the social field – hence why, if I were asked “where is the anger?” in a given situation, I wouldn’t point at the person getting angry, but at those spaces in between the angry person and the thing they were angry at: a virtual field of relations going back and forth between subject and object, reshaping each of them as they move.

The feeling of confrontation, of being confronted, of being critiqued, should therefore be theorised as the affective dimension of a system of power being questioned. The moment of confrontation doesn’t emerge because of some combination of “individual” interiorised emotions – because, for instance, an individual protester is “inherently” angry as some interior quality. The anger, anxiety, discomfort, awkwardness, joy – you name it – that comes in these moments is the affective surfacing of multiple deeper world-views coming into friction. The people targeted in moments of confrontation don’t get emotional for no reason. It’s because, often, what’s happening to them baffles and disrupts them at a very fundamental level. The ways of life they have become attached to are being broken through political action, prompting an emotional, bodily, affective response – an embodied breaking of that previous attachment. This is not a failure of radical activism and direct action, but in fact a condition for its existence. We have to accept that and work with it, planning for the risks involved. Sometimes we may even have to encourage it. [1]

In other words: the commuter’s rage is capitalism getting emotional. The foul-mouthed tirade that assaults our eardrums does not stem from this individual commuter’s bad temper – though that may aggravate it – but instead a system of power being challenged and disrupted.

Rather than being an arbitrary nuisance, then, confrontation is demanded by radical politics that seeks systemic transformation. If we want a total transformation of the economy and society, then we will find ourselves coming up against the deeply held identifications, communities, and desires that some people have formed in relation to the capitalist economy and society. We are going to have to disrupt their everyday understandings and navigations of the world. Simply, dismantling imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is going to piss some people off; it’s going to make white people feel awkward, embarrassed, and uncomfortable when they’re called out on their conscious and unconscious racism; it’s going to prompt men to get defensive when their sexism shows. These varying emotional responses, which will vary in different contexts and depending on the relation of power being questioned, should not be conceived of as the outward pouring of an individual’s ‘inner’ emotions. Instead, they represent a broader social system of power being rattled, making itself heard through the chemical neurotransmitters that jump from neuron to neuron in our brain and the air that rises through our lungs and passes through our vocal chords in an emotional act of speech.

The fact remains though that these moments of confrontation are difficult and often unpleasant, for all involved. In the workplace, speaking up, confronting your superior, can risk your job and your material security. In the street, taking direct action, you risk being castigated by an angry disrupted bystander, and perhaps even being physically hurt. Learning to persevere and critically value these moments, and not be afraid of them, takes concerted persistence and effort; a whole new way of living contra how we may have been brought up.

On this point, Sara Ahmed’s recent book Living a Feminist Life is a valuable resource [2]. In the conclusion, Ahmed offers up a “killjoy manifesto”, making a passionate defence of the killjoy: the person who confronts questionable jokes at the dinner table, causes discomfort and upset, that quite simply refuses the imperative to keep everyone happy. Ahmed notes how our definition of happiness has changed since the Middle Ages and the rise of positive psychology, such that ‘happiness is defined not in terms of what happens to you but of what you work for’ (265). Happiness becomes the precious project of the individual that cannot be disrupted and must be honoured. To be a killjoy, then, is not to want everyone to be permanently unhappy, but to refuse this imperative to be happy, the expectation of happiness, the fetishization of happiness. For this imperative to be happy not only works to nudge people into norm-conforming behaviour, but also to silence violence around us, to pathologise the highlighting of injustice. When happiness becomes an imperative, unhappiness becomes the failure to be happy (which then causes more unhappiness), rather than, as Ahmed notes, a ‘refusal, a claim, a protest, or even just some ordinary thing, a texture of a life being lived’ (58). To pathologise direct actions because they make people unhappy is therefore also to reinforce this imperative to be happy, fed to us through our families, popular culture, and the ‘happiness industry’.

From this Ahmed arrives at the principles of her killjoy manifesto: I am not willing to make happiness my cause. I am willing to cause unhappiness. I am willing to support others who are willing to cause unhappiness. I am not willing to laugh at jokes designed to cause offense. I am willing to live a life that is deemed by others as unhappy and I am willing to reject or widen the scripts available for what counts as a good life. I am willing to snap any bonds, however precious, when those bonds are damaging to myself or to others. And so on it goes. Let us stick by them at family meals, social occasions, and in our activism, face to face with the police, security guards, infuriated members of the public, and more.

“Good” and “bad” confrontation

We have to be careful with the argument so far, though. I have to stress that I am not valuing confrontation in itself, as some fetishized object. After all, is a fascist not “confronting” a Muslim woman when they hurl racist abuse at her? Is a sexist man not “confronting” his partner when he engages in domestic abuse? These kind of things are clearly indefensible from any serious political and moral perspective, and pose questions for my arguments above. As extreme examples, they show that confrontational politics has the potential to become something unproductive and even potentially dangerous. To put it in cruder terms, then, when is confrontation “good”, and when is it “bad”?

Let us bring Chantal Mouffe into the conversation here. For Mouffe, antagonism (as expressed in the moments of confrontation noted above) is the essence of the political, which she defines as ‘the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’ (On the Political, p.9). In simpler terms, social issues always involve decisions that require people to make a choice between conflicting alternatives. In that the very act of decision requires a prior period of undecidability, when the various alternatives are all on the table, antagonism (expressed here through the conflicting alternatives) is constitutive of social life and politics. Antagonism is also present in the realm of political identities. Mouffe notes that political identities are constitutively relational: a ‘we’ can only be defined by establishing an exterior ‘they’. You only know who your ‘friends’ are because there are other people who are ‘enemies’ from which you distinguish your friends from. Antagonism is therefore present in the very ways we define ourselves; it cannot be escaped, denied or negated, as liberalism attempts to do. It has to be accepted as the foundation for political action.

Whether confrontation is “good” or “bad”, then, is ultimately a question of politics. The confrontation of the fascist is bad because it is fascist. The fascism provides the framework for the entire confrontation, from beginning to end. This is why we object to fascist confrontations, arrange anti-fascists marches, no platform fascists, and the suchlike. We, the anti-fascists, confront the initial confrontation.

It’s all well and good saying this, but life is rarely so simple. In most situations political actors find themselves in, what is politically objectionable is not always clear; the water is politically muddied. The classic example is in activist movements when, for instance, there is someone involved who is considered a ‘good activist’ but has a questionable history of sexual harassment, for example. Confronting this person (almost always a man) risks causing divisions in the movement, derailing months of often unforgiving work, and leaving no legacy, to the detriment of the many people who could potentially benefit from the movement’s actions. But equally, keeping things as is threatens the safety of (again, almost always) women in the movement, which could well only multiply if left unchecked. Finding adequate solutions out of these contradictory situations is often difficult and absorbs a huge amount of mental and emotional energy for activists involved, which in this case often tend to be women, BAME, trans, disabled, or LGBTQ+. They are serious issues that need to be accounted for in any discussion of confrontation.

In these cases, I think it’s important to stress that the moment of confrontation doesn’t necessarily mean excommunication or furious tirades (sometimes, though, these may be necessary). While it may appear that’s what I’ve meant throughout this piece, really it isn’t; instead confrontation instead just means occupying and time and space that one isn’t normally supposed to, and making very clear an injustice is happening that wasn’t really being spoken about before. Considering this, while it’s tricky to make any blanket statements here because every situation is riven with its own nuances and complications, I think it’s fair to say that some kind of confrontation has to occur in these situations. The precise form that takes is up for debate. But surely, something has to be said, a confrontation has to happen.

Confrontation then, is no easy matter, no thing to be uncritically fetishized. I certainly wouldn’t want the takeaway of this post to be “it’s okay to be an arsehole”, as if every act of confrontation is de facto ‘radical’ (as I argued above, it isn’t: it’s a matter of politics and context). Our lives are built from relations of care and dependence, and these need to be taken seriously; we need to care for others. But surely, in the midst of the ever-growing need to totally overhaul the way we treat nature, the economy, and society on a global scale, modesty should not be the default disposition in our activism. Confrontation should never, at least, be feared. It should always be a serious option, always on the table, and never shied from.

Footnotes

[1] This idea of confrontation essentially being fundamental to political life is stated here with great inspiration from Chantal Mouffe’s work. See On the Political and The Return of the Political.

[2] Ahmed is just one example of the exploration of the interconnections between emotions/affects and politics, which is most seminally demonstrated in her work The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Others include Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, and Lauren Berlant. The traditional left exists at quite some distance from these theories, sometimes to the degree of mocking them for being too ‘postmodern’, but it’s clear they have utility for any truly radical political project involving direct action. Beyond this piece, I encourage readers engaging with them.

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beastshirt · 3 years

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Angry Liberal Feminist Killjoy Shirt

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tenuoushirt · 5 years

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(via Angry Liberal Feminist Killjoy T-Shirt)

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13signs · 7 years

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The mythology of Lilith is simple, yet through the ages it has been twisted.

Lilith is described in legend as the original woman, before Eve she was first and was conceived by the creator to exist in love and equality with the original man. This partnership was not comfortable for her male counterpart, he demanded subservience from her and rather than lessen herself she departed, expressing the pain of her rejection as fury. Her self respect was intact but according to legend her heartbreak at the injustice of this has burned throughout the ages.

The original man is then said to have requested a woman made of his own body who he thought would bend to his wishes. We all know how that story ended, ultimately Eve sought knowledge and was vilified in mythology and religion for thousands of years. Lilith meanwhile was subject to a lot of vilifying herself, but her story was eclipsed by that of her sister. History shows that it was preferable to forget about the angry one who rebelled, better to tell the story of Eve, the stupid nosy one and blame her for humanity’s 'fall from grace’.

Mythology, legend, ancient stories from a long ago time .

So why is this important now? Why do I not simply laugh at Mr Tysons’ shame- laced sexual ramblings? After all his book, which is published as fiction, only sold 1000 copies and it’s quite by chance that a friend forwarded me the Lilith article on this website that seemed to suggest he was an authority on this subject. I mean, what do I care?

Well I think that storytelling and mythology play a huge part in how we all create and share the collective unconscious.

I know that for many people of both genders this is a time when they are realizing what a huge disservice we have done to our society by disempowering women.

Some of the painful result of this longstanding hurt is still playing out among us women and men both. One example, The 'Shades of Grey Trilogy’ casually reinforcing male conditioning that they must bully and dominate in order to be attractive. It then goes on to confirm the conditioned female belief that eroticism lies in a woman being a willing victim of abuse and not satisfied with that it promotes the idea that ‘playing’ at being tied up and tortured is an empowering privilege granted by sexual liberation. This fantasy indulged by many while in reality young women are still forcibly having their clitoris cut off in the name of cultural subjugation. Awww! Now arnt I the killjoy? Getting way heavy about a bit of pop soft porn. It’s uncomfortable I know, to have something that is sold to us a ‘fun’ contrasted with something that we would rather not think about at all, but I want to illustrate my point clearly, misogyny is deeply embedded in men and women alike, we are all dishonored by it and we would be well to be rid of it.

So back to Lilith, this most hurt, proud and brave of Goddesses, she was the original feminist. That’s right I said the F word! I guess I should address it before I alienate my readers, if I still have any ( appreciate ruining the S and M dream and bringing up genital mutilation might have lost me a few).

FEMINIST- For some the name feminist has become a dirty word, it’s one of the worst things a woman can be right? We are supposed to be passive and acquiescent, either keeping ourselves unthreatening and child like in body and mind or modeling ourselves on the ideal mother, eternally giving, a source of comfort and endless patience. What we are not supposed to be is in any way proactive, vocal or assertive, it’s not ‘feminine’ is it? So heaven forfend that we should express anger, have an opinion, question or demand anything.

A feminist is a man hater. Myth! No I haven’t suddenly developed a lisp and anyway I prefer Ms if you don’t mind (Humor).

A feminist is a man hater? It’s simply not true, I recently was sent this quote and would like to share it.

“Feminism didn’t teach me to hate men, it taught me not to prioritize them over women, but it turns out that a lot of men think that’s the same thing as hatred".

Lilith the original feminist, the one who did not submit, the one who put her own identity and self worth before the dubious comfort of compliance and apathy. The one who defended her femininity so fiercely, that when her ‘lover' disrespected her womanhood, she left and in the pain and anger of betrayal sacrificed her softness

It’s so ironic and not at all acceptable that she should be sexualized in a base way, I believe it to be a way of diminishing the power of her mythology, 'Liber Lilith’ is a perfect example of this. On the Amazon page advertising his book. Mr Tyson claims to 'understand the true nature of Lilith, beyond all the centuries of unjust propaganda thrown against her by the patriarchal dogma of the abrahamic tradition', but the blurb then goes on to say 'Liber Lilith - both an entertaining read of fiction but contains magical and daemonic ceremonies which could work if practiced by a serious committed Occultist. REMEMBER - DONT GO SEEKING LILITH IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED FOR HER TO DEVELOP A DEEP DESIRE FOR YOU !! !! Follow the instructions of Liber Lilith and you might make contact with her. . . . but don't be surprised if you end up a slave to her obsessing influence and hot bitter/sweet kisses.’’

Sadly he fails to comprehend that by claiming her and sexualizing her, he is in fact an expression of the very patriarchal lunacy he mentions. She is the one who said no, not the one who seeks to enslave, it’s pure projection.

Lilith is not a demonic, penis consuming, harlot she is an essential aspect of the divine feminine, who’s story has emerged again now for a reason. Many women resonate with her rage, they recognize expressing it as a valuable part of the process of forgiveness. Lilith is hugely relevant and those who attempt to cloud the power of her mythology by projecting their sexual fantasies on her, only reveal the extent of their own delusion and expose a desperate need in themselves for the healing she brings. I don’t think its intentional, I just think its mindless arrogance, to disregard a woman’s true identity, even a mythological woman and to make her what you want her to be, the irony is that this is what Lilith objected to in the first place.

Thats why it’s worthwhile, staying up so late and writing a response. Lilith is the one who embodies the process of self liberation, who embraces the expression of righteous anger, she is the one who burns through illusion, she is the one who stands up for herself and in doing so accepts and understands the frustration of injustice and the pain of rejection. She will speak, she will be heard at all costs and it is uncomfortable, but necessary for women and men alike because this story, this aspect of the divine feminine, this mythology tells of a process that is essential in the restoration of a painful imbalance that is deeply embedded and that when exposed is often fiercely denied but is actually hurting us all terribly.

Lilith wields an uncompromising sword of truth on behalf of women and so she heals us all. Shame will be exposed, guilt will be felt and anger will be expressed. I pray that this will lead to understanding, compassion and ultimately forgiveness for the process we have all been through together

Lorraine ॐ

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sophygurl · 7 years

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Dance Apocalyptic: Dystopian Fiction and Media In a Dystopian Age - WisCon 41 panel write-up

These tend to be long to click the clicky to read.

Disclaimers:

I hand write these notes and am prone to missing things, skipping things, writing things down wrong, misreading my own handwriting, and making other mistakes. So this is by no means a full transcript.

Corrections, additions, and clarifications are most welcome. I’ve done my best to get people’s pronouns and other identifiers correct, but please do let me know if I’ve messed any up. Corrections and such can be made publicly or privately on any of the sites I’m sharing these write-ups on(tumblr and dreamwidth for full writings, facebook and twitter for links), and I will correct ASAP.

My policy is to identify panelists by the names written in the programming book since that’s what they’ve chosen to be publicly known as. If you’re one of the panelists and would prefer something else - let me know and I’ll change it right away.

For audience comments, I will only say general “audience member” kind of identifier unless the individual requests to be named.

Any personal notes or comments I make will be added in like this [I disagree because blah] - showing this was not part of the panel vs. something like “and then I spoke up and said blah” to show I actually added to the panel at the time.

Dance Apocalyptic: Dystopian Fiction and Media In a Dystopian Age

Moderator: The Rotund. Panelists: Amal El-Mohtar, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman, Lauren Lacey

#ReadingDystopiaInDystopia - for the livetweets and comments

(I think I missed jotting down some introductory stuff as my notes just dig right in - sorry about that!)

Amal talked about how dystopia crosses over into issues of immigration, and Cabell posed the question - “dystopia for whom?”

Lauren discussed teaching Octavia Butler’s Parable series during the November election and then teaching Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale this spring.

Rotund asked the panelists to define dystopia and mentioned the twitter quote about current generations not being promised a future of flying cars, but rather a cyberpunk dystopia.

Amal talked about conflating dystopia with post-apocalyptic, but that the two function differently. They can intersect, however. Dystopia is allied with ideas of oppression - the severe marginalization of a large swath of the population.

Cabell added that this kind of dystopia is somebody else’s utopia. People with privilege don’t want to lose it - that’s dystopic for them.

Lauren discussed anti-utopias, such as 1984, where the audience identifies with the people being marginalized. Compared that with a critical dystopia where there is a horizon of hopefulness - such as Parable.

Rotund brought up the positioning of Firefly as allegorical confederacy and asked how do we deal with that?

Cabell answered - fanfiction.

Amal discussed how she had not connected Firefly to the confederacy due to the lack of themes of slavery, particularly child slavery. As a Canadian, that just wasn’t her first go-to when watching it. There were so many other examples of imperial or hegemonic control without the slavery aspect in her mind - specifically Lebanon, where her own parents had fled from civil war.

Amal talked about playing with this iconography of rebellion without the ugly context of the confederacy. There’s something interesting to play with about these heroes who were on the losing side, but she acknowledges that her perspective is different than those from the U.S.

Cabell stepped in and said “hashtag socialist killjoy” but, the themes of colonization in Firefly were there even without the confederacy angle. For example, the heavy Chinese influence of the culture but we don’t actually see any Chinese people. What are the implications of that?

Lauren said that one interesting part of dystopias is getting to identify with the rebels. This can lead to an unthinking identification with resistance - the idea that all power is bad, all government is bad. This constant identification with outsiders can be dangerous. She added that Octavia Butler does a good job with the complexities of these themes in her works.

Cabell brought up prepatory vs. cautionary dystopias. Putting the spotlight on collaborators.

Amal discussed some of Canada’s issues with how it’s dealt with it’s Indigenous cultures with truth and reconciliation commissions. An issue in Firefly is that we have no idea of any Indigenous life on the planets that are taken over and terraformed.

In some ways, Firefly reflects America’s colonialism with the frontier themes, but what does that look like without any Indigenous populations? Canada’s attitude for a long time was “well, our treatment of Indigenous people wasn’t as bad as what the US was doing...” and that was a fantasy to make themselves feel better about it.

Rotund pointed out that people like to feel like rebels.This was the foundation of Trump’s campaign. It’s a distressing use of the dystopian narrative.

Lauren brought up Handmaid’s Tale and how despite the complexity of it’s historical notes, there were still problems in the ways many marginalizations were ignored.

Amal talked about the appropriation of resistance terms and used MRA’s use of feminist language as an example. Just as a group is gaining a voice against the powers over them, their language is taken from them and used against them. Then the people in power get to have this fantasy of being the oppressed ones.

She brought up Mad Max as this lone man trying to survive the apocalypse and how unrealistic this trope is - we need community to survive.

(I have in my notes in the sidebar for the next page or so that I missed a lot that was said so bear with me if some of this seems extra jumpy from topic to topic)

Cabell discussed the Wisconsin cocaine mom laws that sprang up during the 90′s paranoia about crack babies (which it turns out is not even a thing, the affects were due to poverty not drugs). This was highly racialized. In 2014, California was found to be forcibly sterilizing female inmates - mostly women of color.

The point of this discussion is that we’re already living in the reproductive dystopia. People are in situations where they’re needing to ask themselves how to stay safe in a system that is unsafe for them.

Amal brought up a conversation she’d had that day with a taxi driver when he found out she was Canadian and he immediately started talking about how badly we need socialized medicine here in the U.S. To Amal - the idea that everyone deserves health care as being radical is dystopic! She gets worked up and apologizes and Rotund says - don’t apologize for being mad at dystopias.

Lauren talked about Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as an example where it’s not just about the privileged suddenly being in a dystopia. There’s a theme of complacency, of not paying attention to what’s happening to others. It’s a cautionary dystopia.

Cabell brought up the SNL video of white people just in a constant state of screaming until finally there’s 2 black people and one asks what’s happening and the other answers - oh they’ve been this way since the election.

Amal replied that she noticed a lot of people feeling sort of apocalyptic after the election, but many people of color were more like “oh, it’s Tuesday. Maybe a little more Tuesday than usual but...”

She also talked about how she saw a lot of people from the U.S. saying online that they needed to leave the country, while other people were angry at this notion saying - how dare you leave when we have work to do? Amal, coming from the perspective of her own parents having fled their country, acknowledges that the people in that first group are thinking more about survival.

Amal found herself agreeing to let friends from the US come and stay with her as needed, while also members of her family were working on taking Syrian refugees in. “You think you’re safe until you’re not” - in Handmaid’s Tale, the main character waited too long to leave.

[My own thoughts on the anger about people fleeing is that this is primarily directed at people who do have quite a bit of privilege choosing to leave instead of staying to fight for the people who really can’t make that choice. Example: the whole Amanda Palmer thing ugh]

An audience member asked about the common video game trope of going alone into the woods to survive after a dystopic or apocalyptic event. None of the panelists like that type of game.

Amal really wants a game like that, but about community building. Cabell would pay lots of money for an MMO in that style.

An audience member recommends the game This War of Mine as doing community building well, and asks the question of if the panelists have noticed the need to upgrade security recently.

Amal discussed how she was detained on her way to the states this time and how horrifying of an experience it was. No one did anything particularly bad to her, but it was still awful and invasive. It did make her think both about the idea of state security and “what am putting out online?”

She talked about how she has always self-censored, and the investment her family has put into respectability politics as a means of survival. She’s now opening up more, and finds that she’s angry all the time “that’s my secret - I’m always angry”. And yet she still tempers her rage and fury because she doesn’t want to lose the support of white liberals.

Cabell replied to Amal’s experience about being detained and said - sure they all felt bad but they did it anyway. The idea of collaboration and following orders. When laws are unjust, the moral thing can be to break the law.

She added that the best person to hide undocumented immigrants is someone who has never publicly said that we should be hiding undocumented immigrants, which makes it tricky. The need for networks and cells for this kind of thing.

Amal addressed that the reason the people involved with her detainment were so embarrassed had a lot to do with how she passes, has lighter skin, etc.

(I have a whole chunk of something I wrote down that Lauren said that I added a bunch of question marks to, so not sure I got it down correctly but it was about how increased need for security has affected academia and the sense of witch hunt-ness involved in people speaking their minds freely.)

An audience member asked about examples in dystopian fiction of that use of appropriated language of the oppression.

Lauren brought up that in Parable, published in 93, the president really used the slogan “make America great again”. Also the Aunts in Handmaid’s Tale use appropriated language.

Cabell talked about another real life example, which was the laws created to protect fetuses and how proponents of it said it would never be used against pregnant women, but it ended up doing just that - specifically against women of color.

Amal talked about the idea of needing to protect men from women’s temptation and said that her story Seasons of Glass and Iron has an example of this. She also talked about how in The Hunger Games, punishment becomes entertainment.

An audience member asked about the appropriation of dystopian language and does this happen because the stories are too vague? How do we protect against this?

Amal answered that you can’t stop people in power from appropriating narratives. But you can become aware of it and try to check it when it happens. (and then a whole thing I sadly missed about exogenous settlers/immigrants)

The panelists wrapped up with some recommendations.

Lauren: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett, and Kate Wilhem’s early stuff.

Cabell: Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott, and a title I did not catch ... something Chronicles by Barbara something (real helpful I know, sorry) [Edited to add from Cabell: "Darwath Chronicles by Barbara Hambly! Very fantasy alternate universe; not a "realistic" dystopia/post-apocalypse."]

Amal: the song Miami 2017 by Billy Joel and the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

#readingdystopiaindystopia #reading dystopia in dystopia #wiscon #wiscon 41 #wiscon41 #wc41 #dance apocalyptic #dystopian fiction #dystopias #dystopian media

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general-bear · 7 years

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Hello my name is Cinder and for my birthday I would like a shirt that says "angry liberal feminist killjoy" on it because I am and I'm proud of it

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somediyprojects · 4 years

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Angry liberal feminist killjoy stitched on denim jacket + pattern

#cross stitch #inspo #x

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Nona Willis Aronowitz, Sex, Lies, and Andrea Dworkin, The Cut (March 6, 2019)

Andrea Dworkin was never my kind of feminist. I grew up in the ’90s and embraced my sexual freedom, while Dworkin’s stance was dogmatic about wanting to ban porn and sex work. When I learned about the Second Wave I disavowed her as a man-hating killjoy and stayed loyal to sexual liberationists like my mother, feminist writer and activist Ellen Willis, who thought the pursuit of happiness and pleasure was key to feminism since the early days of the women’s movement, and was diametrically opposed to Dworkin’s dark absolutism in the 1980s. I parroted the (false) assertion that Dworkin thought “all sex was rape.” I’d also absorbed the misogyny lobbed at her, because photos of her repulsed me: fat, dowdy, unsmiling. No, Andrea Dworkin was not for me.

The only problem was, until very recently, I’d never read any of her work.

Reading Last Days at Hot Slit, a new collection of Dworkin’s work edited by Amy Scholder and Johanna Fateman, was the first time I truly confronted her most infamous writing — from books like Woman Hating, Intercourse, and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, along with lesser-known memoir, fiction, and speeches. After years of dismissing the angry, incendiary texts that I felt gave feminism a bad rap, I girded myself for an intellectual assault. My appreciative reaction surprised me.

The collection contains Dworkin’s more outrageous assertions, the ones that repelled me as a young woman and concerned critics like my mom and other pro-sex feminists fighting for women’s desires to be acknowledged and accepted — that men need to forgo their “precious erections” and “make love as women do together.” That pornography “incarnates male supremacy” and is “the DNA of male dominance.” That all intercourse, while not literally rape, violates the integrity of a woman’s body, that women who want it are “experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority.” What women really want, she argues, is “a more diffuse and tender sexuality.” (Speak for yourself!) Her lens was dark as hell: “We are very close to death,” she said in a speech about rape. “All women are.”

But I also discovered that the way she shared intimate, sometimes shocking details of her sexual and romantic life — rife with domestic abuse, molestation, and rape — came off as brave and poignant. I was touched by her love for her father and her gay husband, John Stoltenberg. I was also impressed with her prescience: “Shitty Media Men!” I wrote in the margins of a speech about sexual assault, wherein she plainly stated, “We must make the identities of rapists known to other women.” The excerpt of her 1983 book, Right-Wing Women, on conservative wives’ cynical calculus of supporting male supremacy as a way to harness their own power, felt like a direct comment on the sizeable percentage of white women who voted for Donald Trump, and the rise of Sarah Palin before that.

In many ways, my views about feminism were shaped by the disagreement about the role of sex in women’s liberation, which morphed into the “sex wars” of the late 1970s and 1980s — the “anti-sex” feminists on one side, the “pro-sex” feminists on the other. I wouldn’t call Dworkin’s diatribes “anti-sex,” exactly — she described it often in lush, filthy-mouthed detail — but they were deflating to many feminists at the time. When my mother reviewed Pornography: Men Possessing Women in the New York Times in 1981, she found the book’s “relentless outrage” to be “less inspiring than numbing, less a call to arms than a counsel of despair.”

I grew up in a context in which the pro-sex side had won, so to me, Dworkin’s conclusions about porn and sex still felt narrow and joyless. Yet I wasn’t alarmed so much as emotionally kickstarted by her urgency. The logical conclusions of Dworkin’s work have not come to pass; as co-editor Johanna Fateman told Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times recently, “You don’t have to be afraid that Andrea Dworkin is going to take your pornography away.” We live in a world in which most women feel entitled to sexual and political power, as the pro-sex feminists hoped. We understand the need for a world that condemns male domination while also taking female sexuality seriously — and still a harmonious blend of those two things eludes us. That’s why the predation of powerful men, the slut-shaming of their victims, and the avalanche of abortion restrictions in a largely pro-choice nation make us more pissed off than ever.

With the right to sexual pleasure safely a tenet of modern feminism, her writing serves a different function for me: It galvanizes me to dispense with likeability and embrace indignation. I thought back to what my mom had written about a misogynistic Sex Pistols song in 1977: “Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated challenged me to do the same” — so even as she vehemently disagreed with the content, “the form encouraged my struggle for liberation.”

Andrea Dworkin is my Sex Pistols for the #MeToo era. Next to the vacant, rah-rah version of sex positivity I grew up with in the ’90s, Dworkin’s rage seems downright clear-eyed — even if she might have called cheerful teenage sluts like me “left-wing whores” and “collectivized cunts” for imitating male models of sexuality. A foe of nuance, Dworkin nevertheless invites us to complicate our unbridled enthusiasm for sex. Last Days at Hot Slit is a mirror for what I’ve been afraid of for years: being defiant, being ugly, being unloved by men, even being unloved by other feminists like Andrea Dworkin. “Women discovered each other,” she wrote in 1974 of the early women’s movement, “for truly no oppressed group had ever been so divided and conquered.” That’s a truth worth staring in the face.

#andrea dworkin #feminism #reappraisal #the way we live now #book reviews #metoo

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ethellopez · 7 years

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Angry Liberal Feminist Killjoy -- Women's T-Shirt...

Angry Liberal Feminist Killjoy — Women's T-Shirt

Original Source

Angry Liberal Feminist Killjoy — Women's T-Shirt… was originally published on Jump In Shirt

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dyingalonetogether · 7 years

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1) en route 2) the venue 3) obligatory step and repeat 4) bookended 5) bridal crocs 6) group photo/hat sharing 7) drag queen realness 8) casual ladytux 9) angry liberal feminist killjoy 10) after hours

#brandaura kilt lesbianwedding

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agosnesrerose · 7 years

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Touch/Don’t Touch

Gabrielle Civil during a performance. Photo: Michael J. Seidlinger. Courtesy of the artist.

I’m on my knees, a plump, Black woman in black from head to toe, my blue-black lipstick almost kissing the microphone. My thick, black, curly, natural hair is bobby-pinned flat on both sides, leaving my hair Afro-fabulous in the front and back. I stick my hair in the face of a smiling, bearded white man in glasses, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Y’all have heard Solange’s “A Place at the Table,” right? Yeah! The crowd screams. Y’all have heard “Don’t Touch My Hair”? Yeah! Well, TOUCH MY HAIR. Gasp. The crowd shifts: What?! C’mon. Come on. Touch my hair. I’m bending over and crawling. I’m leaning and entering the white man’s space.

Go ahead.

Touch it.

Nervous laughter.

Touch it. Touch it. Touch it.

I’m hissing into the microphone.

I’m pressing my body flush against his chest.

You know you want to . . .

He’s laughing and squirming. His eyes are closed.

I can almost see the tears forming on the other side of his eyelids.

Just doooooo it. Just dooooooooo it.

I’m crooning. My head is almost in his lap.

His body almost vibrates from my presence.

His hands haven’t moved.

Nothing else can happen until you touch it. Do it right now.

Finally, the poor guy taps my enticing, fuzzy crown.

HOW DARE YOU!

I scramble away from him and rise to my feet.

YOU TOUCHED MY HAIR?!

The crowd roars.

WHY DID YOU DO THAT?

He mumbles something about white privilege.

You better go back and listen to some Solange.

The performance continues.

* * * * *

Bossing, demanding, cajoling, changing my mind, blurring the space between humor and threat, us and them, felt delicious and life-preserving

When I took the stage that night at the Black Squirrel bar in Washington, D.C., an impish frisson of delight tickled through me. Ostensibly a literary reading, with my help, it became something else. I moved the crowd around, pressed my pelvis against the wall in a display of “fat Black performance art.” Hissing, crawling, and confronting the audience felt illicit, mischievous, and wonderful. Bossing, demanding, cajoling, changing my mind, blurring the space between humor and threat, us and them, felt delicious and life-preserving. Who gets to run the space? Who gets to be surprising? Who gets to be bad?

In my early days as a performance artist, I was plagued by the question of who got to do what. As a nice girl, a first-generation-middle-class Black poet, what space did I have for risk, surprise, or perversity? My job was to be smart and well mannered, and most especially good, which is to say, follow whatever the rules of blackness said was right. It is this goodness that got me. Performance art liberated me from all that, the scripts that predetermined exactly what was happening or was supposed to happen, exactly what I was supposed to think, say, and do, and how both powerless and angry I would feel about it.

This moment illustrates one of my favorite aspects of being a Black feminist performance artist: the opportunity to shift the balance between what is expected of me—as a plump, dark-skinned, natural-haired, Black woman—and what I will actually do.

* * * * *

In his essay, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as Ungrateful Black Writer,” Saeed Jones brings up this hair anecdote at a toxic, highbrow literary party: “‘You’ve grown out your hair,’ the poet said, the ice in his cocktail catching light. ‘Now I’m going to do that racist thing where I touch your hair,’ he said as he reached for my afro. His fingers tested the texture of my hair, the way you might squeeze a bath sponge.”1 Yes, still this, in 2017. Interesting too, the poet knows that he’s not supposed to touch the black man’s hair and does it anyway. Where does such license come from?

My entire life as a Black woman, I have been entangled in hair discourse, trying to retwist the locks. How white enslavers categorized Black hair grades on charts to claim Negroid inhumanity. How debates raged in the 1960s, pitting righteous, natural Black women against “bougie,” hot-combed ones. How braids and weaves incorporated the synthetic into both Afrocentric and corporate looks: corn row, conk, press and curl, Jheri curl, French twist, high-top fade. This is not an exhaustive list.

To touch a Black person’s hair without permission—and even to ask to touch it—is sloppy and gauche. This has been true for decades. So, when Phoebe Robinson’s book, You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, came out, I groaned: Really in 2017? Really, Solange? We’re still talking about this? As long as racist micro-aggressions and cluelessness persist along with endemic state violence and systemic oppression, yes, I guess we still have to.

* * * * *

At a performance art workshop in Mexico, a beautiful Afro-Latina college student asked me how I dealt with some of our classmates touching my hair. I asked her if people were touching her hair without her consent, and let her know I thought that wasn’t cool. She said she agreed and had been letting them know. But on a personal level, she wanted to know how I felt about it.

My entire life as a Black woman, I have been entangled in hair discourse, trying to retwist the locks

It was my turn to take a minute and shift. In this workshop, folks had been gazing into each other’s eyes, speaking in different languages, getting naked. What did it mean that I had barely noticed people touching my hair? Had I let my guard down, being outside of the United States? Or had I just taken it as par for the course, a small price to pay for border crossing? Had I felt a special level of trust in that context? Maybe all of the above? Her question sparked guilt at my lack of vigilance. Had I been letting my people down, letting the adversary in? Letting them touch me without penalty? What kind of role model was I being for this young woman? I too had been subjected to blithe, unthinking white people asking to touch my hair, and I had felt objectified and angry, thrust into the pernicious choice between being a mammy or a killjoy. Do I really think that’s okay? Of course not. But in that workshop, I felt such great pleasure at being seen and touched, especially because so often in the United States I feel bereft and undesirable.

* * * * *

And yet. The perverse craving. Let’s change it up. Surprise. Maybe I’m neither the mammy nor the killjoy. Maybe I’m both: a queen and a thot, a poet and a PhD. Maybe I can be strong, make you laugh, make you uncomfortable, make you feel ashamed, make you acknowledge your desire. Maybe I am histrionic, enraged, the angry Black woman. Maybe I’m a temptress, a succubus. Maybe I contain multitudes. Maybe I’m your next girlfriend. Maybe I’m just messing with you because I can. Maybe sometimes I do want it. Maybe I do want your hands on my body, but I want to control it. Maybe I don’t want to be scripted. Maybe I don’t want anyone to tell me what the hell to do or how to feel. Maybe, under white supremacy, I can’t take that too far. Maybe it still bounces back, my armor, an aura of power and protection. Maybe this is breaking the frame. Or trying to break it. Maybe this is an experiment in joy. Maybe this is the balance of Black, feminist performance, tipping the scales of identity, history, and art.

1. Saeed Jones, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as Ungrateful Black Writer,” Buzzfeed, April 3, 2015.

from Art21 Magazine http://ift.tt/2o8JUcq

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