While there are many crucial reasons to be suspicious of open access projects, I can't help but be a bit proud of this one (although I am on record as an objector to the name) that brings fantastic feminist work to the internet (relatively) sans frontières. 


In the latest issue, a fabulous piece on immaterial labour (esp. Negri's debt to its conceptual development via Italian feminists ) by Donatella Alessandrini and a video featuring a great lecture by Dean Spade on critiques of equality claims and the limits of law from the 2011 PECANS conference in Vancouver, Canada.


Also check out Dean's new book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law available from South End Press 2011. 

A cross the Liberal Party has to bear...

RE: (MP who backed Mulcair for NDP leader defects to Liberals)

Lise St- Denis’s floor crossing would be far more legitimate if she had been a well-known local MP that had earned the respect and trust of her constituents. The naked fact is that the people of Saint-Maurice-Champlain in particular, and Quebec in general, voted for whoever was carrying the banner for Jack Layton. The Liberal party earned an abysmal 12% of the vote in her riding. St-Denis’ change of heart could hardly be considered a principled political decision - it is a slap in the face to the people who elected her.

  

Written hastily by David Hugill and Stacy Douglas
For more on floor-crossing and the legacy of attempts to stop it. 

On Hijackings and other Colonial Tropes

On 27 October 2011, dozens of independent African activists and organisations released a statement on the threat of Britain’s 'aid cut' to African countries that violate lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) rights. This letter came on the heels of a widely reported story that the UK was to stop funds going to countries that were reportedly ‘anti-gay’ and was signed by 56 organisations and 86 individuals self-identified as African social justice activists. Anyone that has attempted to write such a well-written co-authored letter knows how much time and effort would have gone into this endeavor long before we saw its release. The letter carefully outlined the problematic assumptions that undergird Britain’s proposed aid cuts, such as its:

•         assumptions ‘about African sexualities and the needs of African LGBTI people’;
•        ‘disregard [for] the agency of African civil society movements and political leadership’;
•        potential to ‘exacerbate the environment of intolerance’;
•        ‘reinforce[ment of] the disproportionate power dynamics between donor countries and         recipients’;
•        ‘further[ing of] the divide between the LGBTI and the broader civil society movement; and
•        support of ‘the commonly held notion that homosexuality is “unAfrican” and…that countries like the UK will only act when “their interests” have been threatened’, disregarding the colonial legacies of the British Empire in criminalizing same-sex practices in Africa, as well as the prevalence of homophobia in contemporary Britain itself.

Throughout, the authors draw out the ways in which such threats play out old colonial legacies that bolster the role of the UK in making economic decisions for African countries, and further instantiate their imagined place at the head of the global regulation machine. In what couldn’t be a more ironic turn, this message was quickly picked up coopted by similar aggrandizing voices within the UK gay movement.

On 22 November 2011, the Peter Tatchell Foundation issued a press release claiming that Peter Tatchell presented the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell with the letter. In this characterisation of the events, the Tatchell Foundation seems to suggest that they were working collaboratively with the African social justice activists in this regard. This is blatantly not the case. Although the authors have not publicly released their own opinion on this offensive portrayal, many of the signatories have good reason to keep their distance from the Tatchell Foundation.  

Furthermore, other gay activist groups in attendance participated in a problematic cooptation of the letter’s original intent. After the Minister claimed that aid would not be ‘cut’ but euphemistically ‘redirected’, the Kaleidoscope Trust entered into a full-blown endorsement of the plans, releasing a statement that actively collaborated with the UK government’s agenda. The Director of the Trust stated that:

Andrew Mitchell clearly understands the importance of setting LGBT rights into a wider context and of avoiding any risk of harm to those that British policy is designed to help. We are fortunate to have a government that takes these issues seriously and is prepared to speak out when necessary.

What’s more, in their complimentary releases both the Tatchell Foundation and the Kaleidoscope Trust failed to question the UK’s assumed position as a primary funding agent for African programs aimed at poverty reduction and human rights violations, out rightly ignoring the signatories’ main concerns.

As such, within a month of the release of the powerful African activists’ statement, as one of my comrades pointed out, the original intent of the letter had been effectively ‘hijacked’. Of course, hijackers are always portrayed as brown and black ‘terrorists’ of various kinds, ruining white people’s holiday vacations/providing the introduction to every Tom Cruise action movie when they seize control of an airplane. However, this scenario offers an important alternative perspective on the history of hijacking - one that predates human flight. This is the old colonial trope of cooptation.

While we’re wheeling and dealing in the realm of colonial legacies, let me point out that the Oxford English Dictionary defines hijacking as the action of illegally seizing something in transit and forcing it to a different destination. In this case, my comrade was spot on. The letter was in transit, carrying a message of autonomy and anti-colonialism to eyes and ears around the world but re-routed by the self-authorised voices of the UK gay liberation movement. Rather than reflect upon and absorb the transformational message of the letter, these organisations ignored and then buried it under their panicked effort to prioritize their own interests. In a situation almost too ripe with colonial legacies to be believable, we need not ask ‘can the subaltern speak?’, but rather, ‘can the colonizers please shut up?'.

Constitutionalism & the Time of the Political

(This post originally appeared on Critical Legal Thinking on 19 September. It is an abridged version of a paper given at the 2011 Critical Legal Conference in Aberyswyth, Wales).

by: Stacy Douglas

In his book The Idea of Public Law Martin Loughlin outlines three ‘orders of the political’ that underpin and orient public law. The first order begins with Carl Schmitt’s famous formulation of the distinction between friend and enemy. Loughlin contends that it is this decision or ‘deed’ that forms the foundations of the political, upon which the second and third orders rest. As such, this distinction comes before the creation of the state and before the creation of law. The second order goes beyond this stage to include a state-based program of governance. Here politics takes its place as the system that operates between the governors and the governed in order to achieve a common goal of security and stability. The third order of politics comes in the form of constitutional law. Loughlin claims that this third register functions to smooth out and balance the systems of state-government via a fair, non-partisan framework. For Loughlin, constitutional law is the result of a collective political bargain. It establishes the ‘rules’ that the people have agreed will guide and orient the relationship between government and governed. It is these three orders of the political, and their attendant relationship that, according to Loughlin, help us to understand how public law ‘works’.

My response here is a very brief foray into the temporality that undergirds Loughlin’s conception of how public law ‘works’. I will pose a few preliminary questions about the use of time in Loughlin’s theory. Namely, I want to point to the problems and pitfalls of i) positing an ‘origin’ or concrete foundation of law, ii) consigning the time of ‘the political’ to a past (the original ‘decision’) upon which governmental institutions are built upon, and iii) using the discourse of empirical history to draw out a boundary of a ‘true’ or ‘actually existing’ community of willing subjects that can perform this original deed. In addition, I want to ask how this narrative of temporality allows us to understand law as something that ‘works’ in the first place.

The Time of Law or How Law ‘Works’

Firstly, Loughlin’s description of public law perpetuates a conception of law as a transcendent force, ‘outside’ and autonomous from a subsequently insinuated ‘inside’. Peter Fitzpatrick has long since demonstrated how this trope fits into a deeply entrenched pattern of origin stories that posit a mythical time of pure beginnings. He argues that law is commonly described in these terms, thereby rendering a projection of it as a coherent and singular entity. He claims that such descriptions “elevate a particular and official interpretation of law and invest this law with abilities and values which render it transcendent and constant” (Fitzpatrick 1992: 5). The assertion of an origin deploys an authorizing temporality of law and its presence – one that scuttles the murky questions about the paradox of this inaugural moment and, indeed, its very impossibility.

Secondly, in Loughlin’s theory set out above, the time of the political has already taken place. If the first order of the political undergirds the second and third then Loughlin has invoked a particular form of temporality into his so-called ‘objective’ description. This temporality relegates the political to a prior time and place upon which governing institutions and constitutional law can be built. Certainly, the emphasis on the foundational ‘decision’ invites a reading of the double meaning of ‘deed’ here. Loughlin clearly is referring to the political decision/action as deed. But ‘deed’ might also be thought of as a type of ‘license’ or legal agreement and it certainly does function this way in Loughlin’s work. With striking similarity to the form of a contract, Loughlin’s ‘deed’ legitimates the institutional politics that are erected on top of it.

Thirdly, in the introduction to the book The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form (2007), Loughlin stresses the importance of ‘real life’ examples in thinking through theory. As further evidenced in his solo contribution in the same book, as well as in his latest book The Foundations of Public Law (2010), Loughlin’s proclivities for empiricism run deep. In both pieces, Loughlin’s argument relies heavily on the historical contexts that underpin and give rise to contemporary constitutional problems. By delving deeply into these historical contexts Loughlin believes that history can act as a tool for making sense of what is otherwise overly abstract.

Loughlin’s historicist empiricism represents a pinnacle example of what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes against. Where Loughlin uses historicism to create and legitimise a knowable and containable community at the centre of constitutional theory, Nancy would draw attention to Loughlin’s use of history as myth. Where Loughlin posits an ‘actually-existing’ constitutional community, Nancy draws attention to the dangerous culmination of this mode of thinking. Instead of closing down imagined conceptions of community, Nancy argues that we must imagine the ways in which community is always already open, between, and shared. Moreover, beyond Loughlin’s predilection for founding ‘the political’ on an original ‘deed’, Nancy advocates for thinking community outside of contractual obligations in ways that illuminate the truth of being-in-common.  

The Mythical Time of Law

So what is the consequence of invoking this particular temporality to tell a story about law, constitutionalism, and political community? I claim there are at least two outcomes that critical readers of Loughlin (and other social contract theorists) should take note of.

Firstly, the story of law’s origins in a social contract – or to use Loughlin’s language, a ‘deed’ – tells us that there is an authorizing moment and, indeed, an authorizer to political community. If we consider the possibility that such foundations are false – the possibility that there is no origin story – then the authorizing force that inaugurates and maintains political community is called into question. Loughlin’s imagined ‘deed’ is a story that does not function neutrally as an objective account of ‘what actually is’ but actively creates an imagination of law’s (central) place in the creation of political community.

The second part of Loughlin’s mythological narrative is his account of the place of the political - ‘the political’ is consigned to the time of the founding ‘deed’. Although Loughlin argues that the ‘deed’ has continued presence and potential after the fact (i.e., it legitimizes the political community’s measures to break with or challenge existing institutional juridical forms), it remains that the political is tied to this contractual moment. In his account, the ‘deed’ legitimizes and authorizes the actions of the political community. This is where and when the political took place and from which it continues to wield its power. As Emilios Christodoulidis remarks in Public Law and Politics: The Scope and Limits of Constitutionalism (2008), this conception of the political runs counter to Schmitt’s decisionism by dropping the crucial element of reflexivity – that is, the ongoing process of deciding the political – and instead relegates it to one moment.

In sum, as Loughlin ‘objectively recounts’ the foundations of public law, he recasts it as inherently tied to this narrative of the political. As he paints this picture, his narrative silently elides the ever-present potential of the political to be in any place and at any time. Instead, this social contractualism confines the political to a ‘proper’ place. As I have argued elsewhere, this demand for ‘proper’ political expression is intimately tied to the discourse of civility. This is most markedly obvious in its constant characterization as the opposite of savagery. As I state in my recent article on the London Riots,

These stories, proffered by the likes of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, assert the necessity of a social contract to establish authorized governmental relations that can then approve or condemn particular political action(s)...According to these liberal narratives, law is what civilizes the state of nature, it is what safeguards the people, it is what assuages the problems of living in anarchy. What these narratives actively remove from the story, of course, is the way that law does not protect but in fact is an active perpetrator of violence. ('Race, Civility, and a Good Cup of Tea: Considering the "Political" in the London Riots', Canadian Dimension, 25 October 2011; also below)

Dwelling on the civilizational undergirding of social contract theory can assist in thinking through the ways in which, for example, the London Riots were deemed ‘not political’. Given the heavy hegemony of the liberal legal schema it is indeed easy to see how actions taken outside of this framework cannot be read as ‘political’. This illegibility, I contend, is linked directly with the temporal undergirding of the social contract theory like that found in Loughlin. As such, analysing the time of this narrative means re-asking questions about the time of ‘the political’, the time of ‘community’, and perhaps most importantly, the time of political community. More pointedly, if we consider that the temporality mythically consigns the political to an imagined past, we might then ask: ‘what are we waiting for?’.

Race, Civility, and a Good Cup of Tea: Considering the ‘Political’ in the London Riots

(Although written in August 2011, this post was first published with Canadian Dimension on 25 October 2011).

by: Stacy Douglas

Rioting began in London, UK on Saturday 6 August after a march on the Tottenham Police Station in north London surged into a violent conflict between demonstrators and police. The protestors were marching for answers about the death of Marc Duggan, a local young black man who had been shot and killed by police in a pre-organized stop and search of a minicab on Thursday 4 August. Following a poorly handled communication (or lack thereof) with Duggan’s family and girlfriend over the next two days and an increasing number of suspicious rumours, angry locals marched to the police station to ask questions on Saturday afternoon. Amidst the rising tension on the Tottenham High Street that day, a young teenage girl was surrounded and assaulted by numerous police brandishing riot shields and batons. This was the act that set the already angry crowds off. That night Tottenham High Street smashed and burned at the hands of a raging community.

After that Saturday, rioting spread throughout various London boroughs. National and international media announced that London was under ‘mob rule’ while showing images of people they deemed ‘criminals’ smashing and looting high street stores. In response, many observers tried to comment on the situation, drawing out grand theories of the political, social, and economic context behind the events. Some blamed social spending cuts brought on by the new Tory budget. Others drew attention to the centrality of consumerism in peoples' lives. Still others decided to call the rioting pure and simple hooliganism, denouncing those involved as criminal thugs. It is to the third set of observers, those who describe the events as the result of a rampaging bunch of heathens, that I focus my attention on here. However, instead of attempting to forward another grand theory of the riots and rioters, this analysis will turn attention to the observers of said riots, or rather, the notion of the ‘political’ in these responses.

LOCATING THE POLITICAL

The failure to see the riots as political comes as a result of a normalized conception of the political that assumes it is synonymous with liberal parliamentary democracy. As one Canadian journalist asserted to me in a recent radio interview – ‘these rioters weren’t targeting government buildings’. For this journalist, the images of the events in circulation did not correspond to what she imagined to be a ‘political’ demonstration; they did not correspond to a framework of liberal democracy that sought government as its aim, nor that had a political program, manifesto, or legible purpose as its mobilizing force.

Moreover, this assumption is racially coded as the discourse of law and ‘proper’ political action are deeply enmeshed in conceptions of civility that undergird the very notion of the social contract and it’s upholding. As such, I argue against those who claim that ‘race’ and ‘racism’ have faded away from this story. Amidst David Cameron’s threats to call in the army, Boris Johnson’s decries of the violence as ‘mindless vigilantism’, and self-aggrandizing volunteer clean-up squads, this story has important things to tell us about race, civility, and the idea of the ‘political’ in western liberal democracy.

THE PERSISTENCE OF RACE

The first way in which race persists in this story comes from my own observational experience of the riots. On the day following the first eruption in Tottenham, the neighborhood was strewn with anti-police graffiti. Spray-painted signs on the road, walls, street signs, bus shelters, and store-fronts forcefully conveyed to any onlooker what the take home message of the violence was – ‘fuck the police’. These messages were ignored by mainstream media outlets. After five days of following the rioting on all social networking and mainstream media websites, I have yet to see a single photo of this graffiti.

Nor was this merely a visual message - shouts of ‘fuck the police’ and ‘you know you’re racist’ resounded in confrontations on Mare Street and Clarence Road in Hackney. On Monday 8 August, one of the largest street confrontations between rioters and police happened just north of Pembury Estate, an event now dubbed ‘The Battle for Pembury’. At approximately 8:30pm, a mass of 300 largely black youth fought the police with vicious intensity, splitting the police lines and rendering the riot suited defense force impotent. No shops were looted, no innocent bystanders attacked – this was a well-mounted and virulent attack on the police. Outside of London the following night, a police station was fire bombed by rioters in Nottingham, petrol-bombs were hurled at police in Coventry, and police were attacked on the streets in Gloucester and Liverpool.

While opportunistic looting also took place in and around these events, the portrayal of rioters as mindless and without cause actively ignores the persistent anti-police sentiment that undergirded many of the events, especially in north London. This attitude stems from a long history of racialised communities fighting systemic racism in the London Metropolitan Police Service and cannot be disassociated from legacies of police violence that were also the subject of riots in Brixton in 1981 and Broadwater Farm in 1985. People who try to play down these realities fail to see the ongoing police violence and state-endorsed criminalization of racialised communities that groups such as the Newham Monitoring Project, Cageprisoners, the English Collective of Prostitutes, and Medical Justice continue to fight against.

The second way in which this story continues to be about race can be witnessed in many of the mainstream responses to the riots that appeal to ‘civility’. This response comes from both expected and unexpected places – from the mouth of the Conservative Prime Minister to those involved with the self-appointed ‘London Cleanup’ entourage. The latter, a combination of voluntarist hipsters and do-gooding citizens with a few hours to spare in the middle of the day, took to the streets with brooms and garbage bags to both physically and symbolically ‘clean’ up the streets. This makeshift group of citizens, exalted by widely circulating photographs showcasing their arsenal of sterilizing weaponry, epitomize the civilizational discourse that is at play in the varied conversations about the riots. These citizens are cleaning up the ‘mess’ that looters left behind. However, this ‘mess’ is not merely a physical one consisting of broken glass and garbage, but it is also a ‘mess’ that rioters have made of the supposed social fabric of British society. In this light, the riots are portrayed as mindless and without intention, while the law – the social contract that legitimizes institutionalized politics confined to parliamentary democracy – is the bastion of reason and civilization. These voluntarist street cleaners affirm that the law that they uphold with the force of their brooms is not only the singularly legitimate route to vocalize dissent, but is proper and good. In another example, a Facebook page called ‘Operation Cup of Tea’, that invited Brits to show their disdain by staying at home and ‘having a cup of tea’, was a top Twitter trend and had over 330,000 members by day four of the riots.

This demand for ‘proper’ political expression is intimately tied to the discourse of civility. Indeed, law is a civilizing force. This is most markedly obvious in its constant characterization as the opposite of savagery – a narrative well known by indigenous populations the world over who experienced the force of legally-sanctioned colonialism by the world’s various empires. These communities and its encroaching settler populations were and continue to be told that the legal violence – often termed ‘negotiations’ or ‘settlements’ by the occupiers – were a necessary element of creating order and founding a legitimate nation. Of course, these narratives have a deep resonance with the contemporary constitutional and political theory that undergirds the political imaginations of most of the globalized world today. These origin stories, proffered by the likes of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, continue to assert the necessity of a social contract to establish authorized governmental relations that can then approve or condemn particular political action(s). This contractual relation and its ensuing establishment has been widely normalized as the pinnacle form of political association. According to these liberal narratives, law is what civilizes the state of nature, it is what safeguards the people, it is what assuages the problems of living in anarchy. What these narratives actively remove from the story, of course, is the way that law does not protect but in fact is an active perpetrator of violence.

While I do not have the space or local knowledge to list a great number of examples of the way in which the law perpetrates violence in Tottenham, the existence of popularly documented institutionalised racism in the London Metropolitan Police, not to mention the devastating conjunction between racialised neighborhoods and poverty, unemployment, and poor public services, works to further state-violence in these communities. Here the myth of law as a saving force is well known. In Tottenham, Clapton, and Hackney, the bourgeois liberal trust of the state – and especially the police – is revealed for the ideology that it is.

Significantly, the erasure of this narrative of race and civility leads us to difficulty in explaining the connection between the riots and the response by the English Defense League and other racist ideologues who are using the events as a vehicle to promote civilizational narratives about the encroaching threat of so-called immigrants and the need to return to an imagined vision of an original ‘great’ Britain. Of course, the riots were not entirely about race either. As excellent reports from The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, among others, clearly demonstrate, rioters were people of many different colours, ages, and motivations. However, when legacies of racism are actively removed from both the events as they unfolded as well as the subsequent analysis, we miss the chance to not only understand how the riots were racialised but, how western liberal democracy is too.

sticking with the ndp

a few years ago i had a disagreement with the ndp over their stance on the second durban conference (the letter i wrote can be found here). i vocalised my concerns to jack layton and he called me on the phone to talk about it. we chatted for 20 minutes. we asked questions of each other and had an intense, yet fruitful, exchange. jack thanked me for the conversation. a few months later, after much inter-party debate, the ndp changed their position. i say this now because i want to highlight that i believe jack layton to be a thoughtful politician that reflects on, and sometimes changes, his decisions - a true sign of leadership. moreover, the party's history and current platform reflect many of my hopes for canada - they are anti-war, pro-universal health care, and committed to working towards better environmental policies. their entire platform is available online.

although some of us may long for other possibilities (i.e., more candidate options, different voting systems, or consensus-based revolutions that do not rely on electoral politics, nation-states, or parties at all), the reality is that this election is going to happen. moreover, it is going to have consequences for us. this is not a declaration of defeat. some may be concerned that investing hope or time in elections means siphoning energy that is better placed in autonomous organising at a distance from the state. these folks would rather see us create our own conditions of existence, imagine alternatives to equating sporadic ballot-casting with democracy, and rid ourselves of the hegemony of liberal-democratic state apparati that often violate us as much as they assist us. and i say, right on. i have said these things myself in other places.

however, voting in this election does not preclude the potential to realise these possibilities in the future. but we cannot yet abandon the state-structure as it continues to dominate our daily lives and political imaginations. it is not yet possible to think about broad-based political change without parties and without elections. and i do not think that simply ignoring the process (i.e., the election) will necessarily help in shifting our imaginations away from state-based politics. we are not ready. and so i am not advocating that we abandon these aspirations but that we recognise that, like it or not, one, or some combination of these parties, is going to have a lot of money and decision-making power in its hands for the next four years. i think that if we can ensure that the ndp is a major player in this configuration, we can expect to see a government that reflects the type of leadership and soft-left policies mentioned above. it is not revolutionary, and it certainly does not constitute the climax of our political demands or our imaginative capacities. our energy will not be drained because our energy has endless potential. rather, with an ndp (or ndp imbued) government, we will continue to think, and act, and organise as before, and we can hope that the only left-of-centre mainstream political party in canada can animate the background, legislating in favour of affordable housing, pensions, and the minimum wage while we continue to think and realise other possibilities. while conservative regimes are drafting up and implementing draconian austerity measures in the uk, portugal, italy, ireland, australia, and elsewhere, cracking down on public protest and ramping up cuts to public services, canada has the chance to do something different.

in short, on may 2, and in the words of stumpin' tom, i'm sticking with the NDP.

Beyond Barbarism: David Kato, Uganda, and the American Right

(This story was also published by Truthout on 17 February 2011)

I, like many, am deeply saddened by the news of the violent death of David Kato, a prominent Ugandan LGBTI activist. David was murdered in his home on 26 January in a village near Kampala. Although the motives for his murder are not yet confirmed, it is highly suspected that David was the target of homophobic violence due to his vocal criticism of the proposed Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, and LBGTI rights in Uganda more broadly.

The bill, before parliament since 2009, further criminalizes homosexuality (it is already illegal thanks to the combined force of lingering British colonial law and governments’ unwillingness to eradicate it ) making it punishable by fine, imprisonment, and in certain cases, death. It is significant that in late 2010, David’s picture - along with numerous other gay Ugandan activists - was published in Rolling Stone (unconnected to the US magazine) alongside a banner that read “hang them”. In light of David’s murder, appeals have been made by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), Behind the Mask, the Africa Regional Dialogue on Sexuality and Geopolitics, Human Rights Watch and others for a full and impartial police investigation into David’s death. This would include an analysis of any possible links to organized violence against LGBTI individuals and communities – a crucial next step in the aftermath of David’s death. However, while identifying the person or people behind David’s murder is of great symbolic significance, it is unlikely that a police investigation will be able to address the larger issue at stake - the complex landscape of homophobic violence in contemporary Uganda.

David was a vocal critic of racist and orientalist readings of Uganda as barbarically backward and hopelessly homophobic. On a trip to the UK last year, David gave a series of talks on the problems with predominantly white gay and queer organizations in the UK painting African countries as blocking the civilizational progress towards the global recognition of LGBTI rights - a road which modern western countries were supposedly paving. For David and his colleagues at SMUG, this overly simplistic perspective of the situation in Uganda erased the ongoing violence that queers continue to experience in the modern western world. David spoke of his shock when he heard stories of gender-queer people being attacked and harassed in London when international gay rights activists in Uganda had portrayed an image of the United Kingdom as the land of the free for LGBTI individuals and communities.

Moreover, David challenged the preconception that somehow homophobia was the ontological property of Africans. Not only was this patently wrong, it also neglected to recognize the campaign of homophobic hatred being pushed by right-wing American church leaders and politicians in Uganda for the past decade. Since 1999, organizations such as the Institute for Religion and Democracy and the Family have been ideologically and economically invested in circulating this narrative as a way of cementing their own political and moral agendas in Uganda. Although most American religious leaders now deny their initial support for anti-gay legislation, David held that these well-funded institutions and individuals (backed in some cases by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR funds) had already helped sow the seeds of homophobic hatred. He challenged the double standard of some gay rights movements to denounce the actions of African nations while ignoring their own governments’ implication in the political, historical, and economic factors of the situation.

As the world learns about the shocking murder of this inspirational young man, there is a danger that it will be inserted along a larger narrative about “homophobic Africa” that perpetuates problematic civilizational discourses of “moderns” vs “pre-moderns”. As cultural critics like Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Jasbir Puar have pointed out, this foundational myth has been the justification for imperialist ventures, colonial intervention, and outright war for centuries, and has particular currency in the contemporary “war on terror”. Gay liberation has successfully been used to bolster the force of the invaders in many contexts, a popular pattern that Puar has termed “homonationalism”. The term describes the resonance between gay rights movements that, for example, deploy narratives of African countries as inherently backward with nationalist mythology used to justify imperial invasion (i.e., saving the women of Afghanistan). These stories mutually enforce each other, building a national imperial project in the name of (supposed) gay liberation. It is my hope that in light of David’s brave intellectual and activist work, international onlookers will not capitulate to the hegemonic propulsion of this narrative by ascribing David’s death to a problem with “Uganda”.

Of course, this is not to deny the agency of the Ugandan government in the worrying escalation of homophobia. President Yoweri Museveni and his parliament need to distance themselves from proposed legislation that further threatens the rights and lives of LGBTI people living in Uganda and to take proactive steps towards greater acceptance of sexual diversity there. But we may also combat the rise in homophobic violence in Uganda by understanding the web of historical, political and economic connections that make up the landscape we are looking at and by putting pressure on those inculcated within it. This, for me, is what David Kato was fighting for.

The state of kettling

(originally posted on Critical Legal Thinking in December 2010...)

The resort to kettling as a preliminary strategy of the London Met has left many of us worried – not to mention cold, hungry, and angry for hours at a time. Those of us who have been subject to the pigpen have many stories to share about being detained for hours on end without medication, proper clothing, food, or communication with outside parties. And we are worried, not just about the growing prevalence of this strategy as a way of forcibly delimiting the spaces of public protest, but also because of its potential effects on the hearts and minds of protestors and other demonstrators-in-the-making.

In several conversations I have had with comrades who’ve been rounded-up on one or more occasions, there has been a recurring theme of concern. These individuals articulate a hesitation about going to future actions for fear of long detainments in (especially as Winter sets in) less than desirable conditions. Of course, one might respond to such concerns with a simple ‘get over it - dress warm and see you on the streets’. There is some important advice to heed in such a retort. Certainly we don’t want to be giving the London Met any credit in scaring us off with their strategies of containment. We could - and will - wait them out any day.

However, as kettling becomes a normalized tactic at large-scale demos, many who would normally be inclined to demonstrate for a few hours talk about staying away for fear of being contained for an entire day. Certainly, the potential deployment of kettling makes it difficult for those with children or other obligations to commit to being on the streets. Moreover, since the normalization of the tactic, I have seen the mere arrival of the would-be kettlers strike fear in people on the streets for fear of arbitrary detention. Now, I am no proponent of liberal democracy but it strikes me that, even on its own terms, the normalization of this strategy has serious consequences for the liberal conception of public dissent.

And Lois Austin agrees with me.

Austin, a demonstrator kettled at Oxford Circus in 2001 during a May Day march, recently challenged the tactic (Austin v Commissioner [2009] UKHL - represented by Christian Khan). Austin argued that the use of kettling was a deprivation of her liberty and constituted a breach of Article 5 of the ECHR. The courts sided with the police in the original case, as well as on appeal and in the House of Lords. In the House of Lords case, Lord Hope claimed “…measures of crowd control will fall outside the area of [Article 5], so long as they are not arbitrary. This means that they must be resorted to in good faith, that they must be proportionate and that they are enforced for no longer than is reasonably necessary” (12). The case has now gone to the ECtHR - along with two other cases represented by Bindmans (Lowenthal and O’Shea) and another by Liberty (Black) - and isn’t expected to be heard for several years. As we wait for the case hearings as well as for the police to act in ‘good faith’, I must point out that holding one’s breath has shown to have seriously adverse health effects on individuals and communities.

Significantly, what the Lords spent considerable time elucidating in Austin was the police force’s need to respond to an “unexpected” threat from protestors who i) did not negotiate their plans with the police, and ii) broadcasted the likelihood of serious property damage. Indeed, the legitimacy of kettling in this instance rested on the understanding of it as a spontaneous reaction, rather than an institutionalized strategy for policing dissent. However, as we see the proliferation of the strategy as normalized tactic, beginning in some cases before demonstrations even begin (see reports from Birkbeck students on the morning of 24 November 2010), the Lords’ reasoning (unsurprisingly) falls short.

Although one might hope that the adverse effects of kettling as a normalized tactic would catch the attention of some Lord almighty (and it may well in the pending Judicial Review investigating the proportionality of the police tactics), the innumerable avenues for clemency available to the police do not inspire hope. In addition to the judges’ justification of the tactic based on the immediacy of the situation, they also legitimized it on the grounds that Austin continued to have access to a megaphone (and therefore her right to freely express her opinions), that there was a potential threat to public safety which only the police could know and monitor at the time, and that it was reasonable, given the actions of some, to detain all. As David Meade argues,

what we see in Austin is effectively collective guilt by association - and the larger the potentially guilty group (that is the larger the numbers of those threatening or becoming violent), the more defensible it is for the police to exercise indiscriminate control. They do not need to make specific allegations of the likelihood of trouble against any one person provided they can identify a cohort they cannot isolate and deal with separately. (Mead [2009] EHRLR: 9)

Not that any of this is new or particularly shocking for most of us. What is significant however, is the prevalence of “guilt-by-association” that circulates in this reasoning, and its resonance with that of the most recent comments made by UK Police Minister Nick Herbert. In an interview with the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow, Herbert warned potential demonstrators of the perils of taking to the streets for the National Day of Action on 9 December 2010. Herbert claims,

anybody joining one of these demonstrations must take care…if you know, having seen the scenes on the previous week, that there is a group of people who are bent on violence, on causing criminal damage, on intimidation, on breaking the law, any of us would think twice, wouldn't we, about whether we wish to be associated with those people” (emphasis mine, Friday 3 December 2010).

Herbert’s opaque comments here are analogous to the amorphous powers of the police themselves – both are driven by vague crypticisms that can be put to use as the wielder (or the wielder’s Staff Sergeant) sees fit. As Walter Benjamin aptly put it in 1921, “the violence of the police is as amorphous as its phantom manifestation (nowhere graspable, everywhere in evidence)”. Given these comments and the judges reasoning in the Austin case, it is likely that “guilt-by-association” will legitimize the use of kettling at upcoming student demonstrations merely as a result of the “violence” at previous demos.

The impulse to seek legal redress against kettling is tempting – indeed, the hopes of finding a thread which would unfurl the tightly woven powers of the police in these instances is enticing. But the fact of the matter is firstly, that cases, reviews, and reports (such as the HMIC Denis O’Connor’s report “Adapting to Protest” ) come after the fact. They have no way of retroactively helping us on the streets when we are dealing with police violence. Secondly, and more foundationally, if such a thread was found, I imagine it would unravel to reveal countless more sweaters, all hand-stitched with loving care by the promises of liberal democracy. These promises, designed to self-legitimize themselves, produce endless justifications for the necessary delimitations of freedom in the name of state security. Here I do not only mean the contemporary experience of governance through securitization, but also the very stability of the state. As we continue to invest our political hopes in these state-sanctioned approaches, we remain dependent on and invested in these promises of liberal-democracy that will continue to allow the police to utilize their powers largely how they see fit.

Kettling is a terrible tactic both for those caught between the police lines, and for those who fear such a fate. But perhaps rather than attempting to frustrate the strategy through legal means, our plan of action should be to show its incapacity to work on the streets. We saw a minor glimpse of this on Wednesday 24 November when police attempted to kettle, sending thousands of demonstrators running in sporadic directions, indirectly creating dozens of anarchic snake marches in central London. These splinter groups may have challenged the aesthetic of the single mob-demonstrations we are used to seeing, but their uncontainability is a real threat to ketling. Perhaps then Herbert’s comments should not be a ‘warning’ to those planning on turning up to the day of action on 9 December, but rather an incitement to creative approaches in rendering kettling an ineffective police tactic.

upping the anti article

what started out as a blog post here, ended up as a full length article in the canadian journal "upping the anti". you can czech it out, along with a bunch of other fab articles, interviews, and letters, here.

while you're at it, why not subscribe to the journal?

getting back in shape

this happens every few years it seems. i have a posting-frenzy and then slowly let my blog die a slow sad death all by its lonesome, only to return to revive it approx. 12 months later. well, here we go again.

in effort to kick start this 2011 revival, im posting some of the things that i've been writing for other blogs, journals, etc...

on defending raw nerve books or white racial solidarity building

on 7 september 2009 raw nerve books announced that the edited collection "Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality" (2008) was out of print alongside a correction and apology to infamous white gay activist peter tatchell. tatchell, for those who dont know, has long been criticized by queer activists of colour and other anti-islamophobic individuals and communities for his liberal human rights discourse which continually demonizes islamic values and practices. for a quick peek go to www.islamophobia-watch.com and search 'tatchell.' in short, tatchell has warned against "...the muslims'...grand plan to promote fundamentalist Islam in Britain. The Islamists want to undermine liberal humanitarian values, which they see as corrupt and decadent". of course tatchell will be the first to point out that he qualifies his claim by asserting that, "Not all Muslims support fundamentalism. Many share our human rights agenda" (www.petertatchell.net).

according to tatchell, muslims - both "fundamentalist" and "moderate" - need to be ushered into the enlightened place of western liberal values. tatchell propagates and extends imperialist islamophobic groundwork by constructing islam as an unchanging, monolithic, homophobic, sexist, and distinctly barbaric worldview. for tatchell, discrimination is inherent to muslim ontology. as a result, muslims are hopelessly backward and need the saving hand of a gay white human rights activist to show them the way towards freedom offered through united nations charters and annual pride parades.

but tatchell is not my point of focus here.

raw nerve books describe themselves as "...an independent, not-for-profit feminist press publishing controversial, under-represented and experimental work." they published the book and then issued it "out of print" after tatchell cried wolf over content in one of the chapters which characterised him as islamophobic. in an apology that could only have been written by tatchell, raw nerve disgustingly retracts such allegations (made by the authors) and then re-frames tatchell as distinctly anti-racist, listing a smattering of work he has done in "africa" (ignoring the 'public statement of warning' written by african lgbti human rights defenders about working with tatchell) and with anti-fascist groups in the uk. might i just say, great "anti-racist" work there tatchell, actively silencing queers of colour who dare challenge your politics.

some have claimed that raw nerve was in a tricky position because of the potential threat of possible legal action* which, if they had had to fight, could have cost them the press itself due to their meager economic positioning. this argument supports raw nerve's decision as a strategic way of ensuring the longevity of other alternative publications that the press will continue to print long after this whole "nasty" affair has blown over. as a result, what we see here is not the "publication of controversial work" but the publication of work that is distinctly not controversial - work that fits the mold of the established white liberal feminist and queer movements. moreover, this is not just the come-to-be-expected institutionalized publication scheme that continually publishes largely white middle class feminist academics. raw nerve actively hung these authors out to dry. and unfortunately for those hoping this will all just go away, this episode stands as a poignant analogy for the close relationship between racism and contemporary queer and feminist politics. dissenting voices of queers of colour are silenced for what is always characterized as the "larger" goals of the "movement". the argument that defends raw nerve books in their decision is part and parcel of a technique of white racial solidarity building.

i started writing this post with the view to discuss the importance of publishers who understand the significance of standing by their authors and of feminist and/or 'alternative' independent publishing for the dissemination of critical dissent. raw nerve claims to operate on these principals but buckled when push came to shove. of course, some may say that we shouldnt expect institutionalized publishers to be anything other than a state apparatus, bowing down to the threat of legal action or monetary pressure in the service of state-endorsed dissent (aka tatchell's liberal human rights discourse). but if we believe in "asking questions that might indeed touch a 'raw nerve'" - which might include challenging white racial solidarity building practices of queer and feminist movements - we must demand it to be so.

for a great response to the censorship, read xtalk's statement.

* tatchell has publicly claimed that he did not threaten raw nerve with libel but merely "objected" to the contents of the chapter in question. the possibility of legal action was purely speculation on these commentators' parts.

harper's doing good work these days

on september 26, 2009, canadian prime minister steve-o harpsies announced to the rest of the suits at the g20 conference in pittsburg, and the AFP who were listening at the door, that canada has "no history of colonialism". he continued, "we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them" (Calgary Herald, 26 Sept 09).

as you can imagine, this has resulted in a few polite letters to the editors of history, penned by folks who would like to diplomatically draw monsieur harper's attention to the few hundred years or so of complex, overlapping, violent, and - significantly - ongoing, colonial history that really is quite quintessentially 'canadian'. but i say, don't censor the poor man - let him speak!

no, this is not a libertarian defense of freedom of speech, bemoaning the waning of individual liberties in the name of political correctness. i stand by the fumbling national mascot for different reasons.

harper's blatant disregard for history and especially for diplomatic relations between communities and individuals who call for institutional attenuation of the legacies (including the ongoing project) of colonialism, exposes the gap between capitalist liberal-democratic promises of good governance and "justice". his outrageousness is a potential catalyst, of which we could use many, in galvanizing a public - or at least a portion of the public - into thinking seriously about the limits of our current social and political organization. maybe his shocking lack of self-awareness and outright denial of history, will drive people into revolt. perhaps communities and individuals will decide they've had enough and dismantle themselves from the current civic terrain, bringing the nation state crashing down with it!

of course, i am giving little stephen jo-jo too much credit. people have been organizing their own social and political communities for a long time now. indeed, they have long-since given up on their faith in those of monarchical lineage and their respective promises. however, i make this point here because as many of us interweb-addicted info-sharers get our little html panties in a knot about harper, we miss out on pointing out that his words have stirred up more discussion about colonialism in canada than we can say about our do-gooding friends (myself included) at say, softer nationalist institutions like the cbc. critiques of harper's outlandishness have a latent republicanism undergirding them that i want to be suspicious of - what exactly are we whining about? would we like him to have a better speech writer so he can poetically avoid mentioning the little blip of bloody violence that is the foundation of the canadian nation-state?

let's face it, harps, or whoever is wearing the crown for the day, is never going to be able to address the history and ongoing project of colonialism outside of a language of liberal-democratic state-talk. so isnt it better that what he does say garners it a little more attention than whatever status-quo settler speak we've come to expect from the state and its colonial apparatuses?

marxism2009 - zizek/callinicos part one

i havent actually listened to this talk yet. i purchased the cd after missing the lecture on saturday night. i have heard that, despite my recent endearment to him, zizek has gone and made me have to re-re-reconsider why i continually listen to him, by making - and subsequently defending - a joke about rape during this talk. apparently someone makes an intervention during the question period but zizek's response is - again, this is liminal-space gossip - somewhat lacking.

i think it is important for sympathetic feminists to be at zizek and other machomachine rockstar talks to offer some interventions when all the rallying boys are about to cream in their pants over whoever is orchestrating the international that day. i am also not about to totally write him off...i like a lot of his work and disagree with other parts...i just wish that in some of our discussions about 'communist culture' and 'socialism for the 21st century,' that we could have some hard discussions about the failings of past movements in a gesture towards a better future marxist project.

i used to think that picking the right academics was part of an overall academic aesthetic - me, get caught at a zizek - or worse yet, david harvey - talk?! of course, swimming in the red sea does require a lot of critical interventions to unsettle the unspoken white straight male subject and its dichotomistic trappings (when the subject is troubled it is always through essentialist feminism), but i appreciate the disagreements so much more now. just like i can finally admit to myself that i disagree with some of my old and new feminist icons...and it feels so much smarter and politically relevant to disagree. of course, i recognize that some disagreements are welcomed and even fostered in feminist spaces while beefs about transphobia or secular imperialism at marxist events are often not...and that my white, gendered-bodied privilege is maintained and fostered as some critical discussions - esp. on race and trans issues - are sidelined.

for me, the most productive and rewarding parts of a lecture are the interventions, the disagreements, and the contestations - without which, the substance of the material sits comfortably in a monologic cavity. this is not to privilege the reductionistic conception of 'dialogue' which i think is ultimately a false sense of mutual engagement that fails to consider hierarchical social, political and economic conditions between conversants. further, the notion of 'dialogue' falsely reduces the conception of a conversation as ultimately between two parties, actively erasing the presence of multiple other actors (especially non-human) from the social sphere. nor do i promote the act of disruption for disruption sake. i definitely do not mean to contribute to the ever-growing anti-intellectual demonization of academic talks that - drawing on dangerous structuralist readings - over-emphasize the supposed 'violence' of the unidirectionality of conventional lectures. these requiems for the 'lost experience' of dialogic encounters include a strong aura of structuralist sentimentality that exhault an essential experience of listening, hearing, and engaging.

what i do mean to say, however, is that it can be useful to guard against the pressure of agreeing for the sake of aesthetics. for me, it has lead to an increase in intellectual stimulation and creative academic pastiche. besides an aesthetics of disagreement is so much hotter.

alas, without much further ado about nothing...

alibi baby, in the treetop

i posted a tirade about book burning in december 2008. this week i posted a flyer and announcement about a dj gig i recently acquired at the kenton pub in hackney. four months have passed in between these two events. for some reason i am compelled to account for that time.

i am not compelled to testify to some imaginary audience that might be reading this blog but i am compelled to testify to myself. i would like to reflect on the time that has passed as 'productive', or 'directed', or at least not as a total write off. and so i write frantically, attempting to excavate something from the silence that has pervaded my blog - and this certainly part of a larger pattern of simultaneous silences and supernovas in other parts of my life - for the past 16 weeks. making it public lends it some legitmacy that i need. permit me a bit of self indulgence here.

court is in session.

after a long trip home to canada in december and january, i returned to be completely swamped with preparation for upcoming conferences and a relocation of my long lost lover to london for march 1st. add one move to london and another trip to america for yet another conference, stir, and that almost brings us to the beginning of may. and yet, although i can submit this evidence in support of my unannounced virtual absence for the last third of a year*, i sense there is something else that has kept me away. or rather somethings.

#1. lack of inspiration or lack of perspiration?

i think this is either as a result of not sitting still long enough to develop a coherent thought (don't you just hate how transcontinental travel stifles your creative processes?), or because my engagement with ideas has been changing over the past half of a year. both my interests and my method of critique is morphing into a much more contemplative, dare i say stoic, approach. i have always been critical of my tendency to snarl my way in and out of debates, but recently i am much more (philosophically) interested in considering the limitations of such hostile, self-righteous techniques. and it is not a patronizing performace of tolerance that i am edifying here, but a genuine realization that i have been caught in a self-woven web of moral righteousness that offers intellectual security through intellectual stagnation. in other words, me and my brain have just signed up for a one-year subscription at the local YMCA. i hope they have rowing machines.

#2. fear?

some cliche deep inside me made me write this.

#3. time?

both time passing and not enough time. by 'time passing' i refer to that often referenced fear that 'too much time has passed' and now it is impossible to go back and set things right (i.e., rather than post four months late, it would be easier to just start a new blog, or to move to dubai, change your name, and when asked, refuse to ever acknowledge the existence of anything called 'the internet'). and, of course, there is the jessie spano syndrome, that not only speaks but sings, all of our deepest anxieties about never having enough time to devote to 'extra-curricular' activities.

all of these alibis are, of course, bogus and yet the stronghold they have on my inclination to write is fantastic. my explanations are fundamentally limited by the language i have to make sense of thoughts and feelings and as a result, will inherently be misrepresentative. this however, is inadmissable reasoning at a trial and so i will stick with my original alibi and hope that the performance of this ritual will clear the air of any bad feelings between myself and myself. besides, it is the ritual - not a hopeless attempt to define a genuine truthfulness behind my lack - that i need.

*converting months into their relative relationship to the overall year is a sure way to induce heart-stopping panic attacks.

radio rebelde.

a live dj night at the kenton pub.
38 kenton road, hackney, e9

first friday of every month.
www.kentonpub.co.uk

*electronic*newindiesounds*feminist

punk*dubstep*pop*americanoldies*rap*alternativerock*mashups*specialguestappearancesbytheironlady&otherpoliticaldinosaurs*

____________________

Mayday!Mayday!

FRIDAY MAY 1st
8 to 11pm

Finish off the day-long celebration of workers’ struggles with us at the Kenton.

out of her senses like a dog she barked

this week i listened to someone give a presentation of a book review. the book was what you might call an obviously orientalist text, complete with uncomplicated universalizing of western christian values as global values, and tokenistic reference (one chapter) to 'other' worldviews such as those homogenous cultures in 'india' and 'china' that are just so darned easy to summarize. the book was presented to a group of students, myself included, as a text that would be worthwhile for new scholars and their teachers in the field in which the book was immersed - ethics.

as the book sat silently on the table beside its puppet, i was shocked at the amount of violence such a tiny little thing could carry - the book, i mean. while of course the book is only significant in the context of multiple other influential sites of orientalist meaning-making, the innocent looking little paperback of not more than 200 pages sitting before me allowed its reviewer to read the story of contemporary western ethical principals as simply passively inherited. according to my gracious interlocutor, religious wars and longstanding principled regulations launched in the name of christianity, are apparently rendered insignificant to the current ethical frameworks of the west. i take issue with this because as these culture-shaping events are ignored in the book, they further erase the extensive histories of imperial cultural domination through which the contemporary moral foundations of the west are stabilized. some examples of these textual omissions include, enduring legacies of islamophobia (from varying scales of christian cultural domination such as the crusades and including canonical literature such as dante's inferno), gendered violence (the eradication of pagan and feminized medicinal practices through the practiced burning of so-called witches), and colonialism (if enlightenment taught us anything, it was that the civilized know better than the savages). indeed the sanctity of modern ethical frameworks in the christian world, including western legal traditions, rests on these historical practices of active suppression. although the christian moral foundation of the west as often (mis)taken as an acquiescent invisibility, it is certainly not a set of values that simply 'came to be.'

as the reviewer concluded by reiterating the great pedagogical value of the text, my levels of anger reached their boiling point. there, in that university classroom, i found myself thinking an unthinkable thought...'i would like to burn that book.' pause. 'i would like to burn that book?' pause. if i burned the book, people would call me a fascist. granted, if i burned the book, i would call myself a fascist. im sure i could never bring myself to burn a book. but this got me thinking, what is it about burning books in the west that is so evocative?

certainly, the books of iraq, palestine, and afghanistan have been recently burned - and continue to burn as i write - by the hand of allied forces' bombs and airstrikes. certainly, poorly funded individuals and organizations who collect archival materials necessarily subject their collections to unsafe environments because they cannot afford secure storage. these practices can result in the loss of years of documents and ephemeral materials from minority cultures due to things like basement flooding, or violent eviction measures. moreover, the foundational structure of the publishing industry itself is such that there are certain types of knowledge, certain languages, certain subjects, and certain ways of communicating, that are (pardon the pun) bound to be published. the industry itself thereby regulates the fundamental concept of what can be considered 'a book.' do these examples, not also represent forms of, albeit in some cases more subtle, 'book burning'?

of course, the burning of books conjures up images of dangerous, alarming scenes - with particular historical reference - where freedom of speech is under attack and ideologies have gone to such extremes that textual forms of dissent cannot be tolerated. however, do the less-prescriptive forms of exterminating books not also embody the same fundamental issues that we are fearful of when we think of infamous public book burnings such as freedom of speech, and ideologically informed censorship? why is it okay to burn some books and not others? whose practices of book burning get labelled fascist and whose are exempt from criticism due to insitutionalized excuses such as 'collateral damage' or a normalized capitalist private property ownership model that systemically discriminates against those who cannot, or refuse to, engage with it?

my deeply entrenched liberal values urge me to guard against a reading of my words here as an endorsement of book burning, but actually, im not sure what that i would be defending. the moral value attributed to the sanctity of 'freedom of speech' is not a passive right or inherited foundational principal of freedom divorced from historical and political context, but a device that actively legitimizes some kinds of 'freedom of speech' over others'.

facebook walls' inexhaustibility are exhausting

on tuesday, november 11th i became aware of a facebook group called the "york anti-strike group." intrigued by the provocative name, i visited the group's page only to be (i suppose unsurprisingly) berated by an onslaught of anti-union and anti-strike sentiments, expressed through such enlightened statements as "The [strike] may not be illegal but it is immoral" and "Some of my friends are TAs and they are against the strike. They knew what they were getting themselves into when they decided to work as TAs."

i joined the group and tried to enter into these discussions via the group's facebook wall. naively, i thought that by using a little irony - a la steven colbert - that i might highlight some of what i saw as the direct outcome of mike harris' common sense revolution...youthful minds moulded by the incessant rhetoric of law, order, and above all, neoliberal economic reforms at the cost of workers' rights. of course, 2, 300 members, 82 pages of wall postings, and 3 days later, i withdrew from the battle, tired and hopeless. although there were a lot of people trying to make intelligent, poignant pro-union interventions in the anti-CUPE discussions, the easy-to-post, visual interface of the facebook wall meant that these affective ruptures were continually lost to the backlogged pages of the group's wall. since it's such a shame that more people couldn't have been privy to some of the highly entertaining discussions on this site, i pasted some highlights below.

however, my infiltration did not prove totally useless. while fishing around on the group's wall i found a post from the policy chair of the york ndp group which read:

PP:

New Democrats at York University are officially NEUTRAL on this strike.

um, what? about one week and 40 impassioned exchanges later from multiple people (members and non-members alike), the group decided to change their position and support the striking workers. however, my experience in conversing with these folks has really shaken any lasting belief I had in what kind of alternative political potential the ndp can offer if they continue to attract members who believe in "staying out of labour disputes" or think that the party offers a place for a whole spectrum of ideologies, including being a Liberal: "Even within the NDP there are those at centre of left (if that make any sense) and those of left left (or further left). One can think of centre of left, closer to centre (LIBERAL)." Yikes.

____________
from the "york anti-strike" facebook group
some highlights
nov. 11-13th, 2008

SD:
i just hate unions. weekends, safe working conditions, power against an increasingly powerful ruling class of bosses and managers - how dare they try to make the lives of working people better. what a bunch of dicks!

now the administration, that's who i'd like to see come out of this one on top. they're the ones who are really being hurt by all this. i mean, just think of all the extra money they have to spend on gas for their new ford explorers as they wait to cross the picket line. and it also means getting back to their 2 car garage home in vaughan a few minutes later then normal. this is all not to mention all the extra work that this strike is causing for them...handling media phone calls to maintain the university's reputation, dealing with uninformed, ignorant undergraduates (and their parents) who think education is about consumer rights...honestly, those TAs are just plain rude!

why dont the TAs see that they alone have the power to end this thing?

AJ:
I don't think unions are the problem Stacy, it's how they are misused. I personally have no quarrel with what the TA's are doing in principle, I'm sure if I was in their position I'd probably be concerned too, however I cannot condone their methods. I refuse to accept that the best way that they can think of making their point needs to negatively affect 50 000 plus students (and that's just the people who actually take classes in York University.)

SW:
Seriously, Stacy? This is the students' education our "educators" are putting on hold and inconveniencing. And you know what? Maybe these TAs deserve more money, maybe they don't, the point is that I AM PAYING their wages, regardless of the digits. MY TUITION is what goes into all their pockets whether they strike or not. Their inconvenience to me is not earning them any sympathy from my wallet. I don't agree or disagree with the terms or reason for the strike, my disagreement is with the inconvenience to my education. I'm so glad other students have also realized this. I was afraid I was the only one who realized this.

Jay, I had no idea the union provided those busses! I did, however, think it was ridiculously irresponsible and ironic that the YFS would support the CUPE strike and the drop fees rally on the same day. Sometimes, I get the feeling the YFS has no idea what they're arguing, they just like to argue.

I, for one, just want to get back to school. This is my LAST semester, and I'm not even a York student. I'm a visiting Western student studying 2 half courses because it was cheaper for me to move back in with my parents than to spend another semester in London. If this strike goes on too long for me, I miss out my timeframe to apply for graduation at Western and I know the admin will not be sympathetic to York's strike.

PM:
I thought the YFS represented undergraduate students?????

SD:
yeah, that stupid YFS president - doesnt he know that the vast majority of us consumers, i mean undergraduate students, will be in positions as TAs in the future if we pursue an academic career? who does he think he is, having an intelligent analysis of labour and foresight into struggles that might affect us in the future?!? like i said before, i think it makes a lot of sense to be attacking the TAs and union organizing when the administration has absolutely no power in the situation! i mean, its not like my tuition fees pay the administration's salary as they continue to refuse to meet the union's demands and run an effective PR campaign that turns our attention away from their role in the dispute and onto the underpaid workers (aka. us in the future).

SD:
forgot to add: union = a bunch of dicks!

...


BM:
I busted through the picket line today at Chimneystack Rd on my motorcycle, man were they pissed!! Definitely worth it tho

SH:
the administration has already agreed to binding arbitration. now it's up to the union to go to the table. as far as im concerned the union is holding students hostage!

SD:
Yes, if we use binding arbitration, we can force them into a corner without any rights!
"As an alternative to judges or courts settling disputes between consumers and businesses, binding arbitration works out a deal through a third party body. The arbitrator's decision is final and cannot be disputed or appealed. Businesses prefer to resolve claims through binding arbitration because it is more private, avoiding possible bad publicity that could erupt in a trial. They are also not bound to certain legal requirements, such as "discovery" whereby the persons involved in the claim have access to otherwise private information. A consumer has basically waived their constitutional right to sue when they sign a mandatory binding arbitration clause as part of a contract. Consumer advocates point out that many people do not know they have denied themselves that right. Nor are they aware that the independent arbitrator may have an interest in siding with a corporation for financial reasons."

...

BD:
I assume the members of this group are not thinking about graduate school at York in the future. Otherwise, they would be supportive of the strike and their financial future as a graduate student.

NM:
U know what they say when assume...

Actually I AM thinking about Grad and law school. Why would I be out striking in the cold? I happen to like what I would be getting if I were to become a TA.

It's the contract faculty who have the raw deal.

SD:
actually, it's the administration who are getting the raw deal! the president of york is only making a measley $500, 000! if anyone should be on strike it should be the president and vps who are especially hard hit by the global financial crisis. and those TAs and contract faculty have the audacity to ask for higher wages - i mean the cheek of it all!

read all about how little ontario university president's are getting paid here:
http://www.thespec.com/article/396776