because it lightened my day

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Warning: if you follow this link you will be exposed to 80s music and an 80s video clip.

hilarious. wonderfully 80s. made me laugh a lot after a day of reading about the effects of climate change in relation to migration and Indigenous peoples around the world.

- dredgirl

Writing a PhD is really fucking hard

I am currently trying to finish a complete draft of my PhD thesis. I have found that for the past two or three weeks I have been unable to focus on the task. I’ve been restless and had a touch of writer’s block. So, I figured maybe writing about it and explaining my thesis on my blog might help me work through my problem.

My thesis is a theoretical exploration of the relationship between ’sovereignty’ and ‘hospitality’. By this I mean to say that I am interested in a range of questions pivoting around the role that our conceptions and practices of sovereignty (for example, the sovereign nation-state, the sovereign subject) have on our notion of ‘hospitality’ (I am especially concerned with refugees, Indigenous land rights and immigration more generally). What I attempt to show in my thesis is that we have a taken-for-granted understanding of sovereignty which circumscribes and limits the possibilities of being hospitable to others. We also have a view of hospitality as obedient to the sovereign, so we expect that visitors to the country will carry appropriate visas etc. We absolutely privilege citizenship in this world, and seem unable to imagine a world without such a category of belonging.

So in the first chapter, called Sovereign Hospitality: Deconstructing Normative Theory, I look at the historical development of ’sovereignty’, showing that it has traditionally (at least in the ‘west’) been understood as a way of legitimating authority and power, of unifying power and investing it in a recognised political body (the state). I trace the two major strands of thinking sovereignty, one which is derived from figures such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean Bodin and Carl Schmitt and tends to regard sovereignty as indivisible and incontestable (broadly and simplistically these guys are part of the sovereignty=Right camp). The other strand arises out of the works of other white dudes like Locke and Mills, and tends to suggest that sovereignty emerges out of responsibility, that it indebted to natural rights - human rights for example. Thus we have sovereign right and sovereign responsibility. This is then discussed in relation to how it effects ‘hospitality’, our offering of refuge to asylum seekers and other strangers. We are very familiar with the ways in which sovereignty is invoked to guarantee the right of the nation-state to protect its borders (think former PM Howard’s infamous “We will decide…” speech), and we are also aware of how sovereignty is used by the opposing camps to argue for refugee rights (sovereignty requires that we be responsible to those who seek asylum). Ultimately I argue that both of these positions leave the idea of sovereignty intact. This is a problematic position to maintain, I contend, because it is the very concept of sovereignty that must be unpacked and challenged.

In the second chapter I analyse the practices of hospitality allowed under liberalism in Australia. I trace the historical relationship between liberalism and racism, drawing on various theorists, including David Theo Goldberg and Aileen Moreton-Robinson to argue that (neo)liberalism is deeply racist, even as it presents itself as beyond race; as if all individuals are equal and the same. The US theorist Angela Davis refers to Liberalism as a “coded language” that results in “camouflaged racism” I apply this idea to two areas of political interest: Indigenous land rights and refugees. In terms of Indigenous land rights, liberalism and neo-liberalism deny communal rights and attempt to assimilate diverse cultural difference into a normative model of land ownership and production. The logic of exploitation and economic rationalism refuse the possibility of understanding ownership and belonging in ways that challenge corporatist agendas. In relation to immigration, neo-liberalism underpins the current models of migration, bolstering business migration to the country whilst simultaneously advancing corporate interests in the development of private detention centres. I go on to argue (following this) that neo-liberalism is interested in protecting whiteness in Australia, both through the dominance of a liberal notion of property rights as well as a fierce protectionism of the border.

Chapter three develops these ideas but in the context of a major thinker of sovereignty Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas have been extremely influential of late. Agamben’s thesis is that modern forms of sovereignty are concerned with the right to decide on the exception (known as ‘the state of exception’). The state of exception is that space which falls outside of the normal legal order even as the sovereign saturates it. So, an example of this is Guantanamo Bay where the prisoners are stripped of all rights (human and citizen) but subject to the sovereign rule of the US government. Anyway, so basically this chapter analyses Agamben’s theory, draws out its implications and applies it to “climate change refugees”. This chapter deals with the idea that sovereignty may only be able to produce violence, and that this violence is racialised and economically determined. Within Agamben’s paradigm of violent sovereignty, hospitality can only ever be given and taken as a “right”, but is always subject to the sovereign decision.

The last chapter (and the one I am currently trying to finish) is an attempt to challenge some of Agamben’s ideas using the works of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak. In this chapter I am hoping to answer a few questions, such as: Is there an inescapable violence in the way that state sovereignty deals with and negotiates its borders? Is hospitality toward the ‘other’ consigned to and restricted by violent sovereignty? Is there a way to destabilise the relationship between violence and sovereignty, and finally, what happens to sovereignty when we privilege hospitality?

So, yeah, writing a PhD is really hard, but I think this has helped me Anyway, I’ll return to this soon.

-dredgirl

The Gruen Transfer III

So I watched The Gruen Transfer again last night and I was pleasantly surprised at a couple of points. Where I felt there had been a complete lack of analysis in previous episodes, last night there were some remarks made out of passion (as opposed to defences of advertising made out of self-interest, something Russel Howcroft is especially prone to). The program took an “in depth” look at cosmetic products and cleansers in terms of how they are marketed and the use of the “magic ingredient” to lure consumers. But, just when I was starting to feel like the segment was going to simply be another collage of ads with a few jokes sprinkled in for good measure, the (token) female panellist (and the only one with guts! aside from Todd Sampson who often has interesting things to say) Jane Caro, forcefully criticised the role of advertising in reproducing low self-esteem for women, as well as setting an impossible standard of beauty which blatantly fails to recognise the process of aging. In fact, she made the claim that entire economies would collapse if women woke up in the morning and thought, fuck it, I am beautiful, I don’t need these expensive products to make me look more beautiful to the male gaze. Hetereonormative yes. But Caro introduced some actual content to the program and a short debate ensued about the degree of responsibility advertising has for the reiteration of low standards of self-esteem. Todd Sampson pointed out that advertising was merely part of the problem, not its cause, while Caro stood her ground implicating advertising as an industry as it benefits from praying on peoples insecurities. Russel Howcroft maintained his usual arrogance by claiming that well, advertising certainly doesn’t have its hands dirty here; it has nothing to do with low self-esteem, rather it is about “beauty” and the desire to be beautiful. Advertising simply enhances beauty.

I did, of course, have a couple of problems with both the frame of the debate and its limited political scope. Would it truly be radical to mention the gendered differences more explicitly? To perhaps even acknowledge the ways in which advertising is invested in maintaining patriarchal norms of femininity and masculinity? That these norms are changing, but that there are still significant political and ethical points to be discussed. Or would the word “patriarchal” result in the loss of all integrity by she or he who utters it? Would the inclusion of “patriarchy” introduce a structural dimension that is harder to mark, name and critique? Talk of structural violence, of institutionalised and dispersed forms of power informed by gender, race etc, have been replaced with the simpler model of the depoliticised neo-liberal, hyper-consumerist individual. Thus, it is not about self-esteem and how this relates to gender in a broader sense, even as some individuals may experience low self-esteem (but that’s only an individuals responsibility/fault).

I feel as though I am making really obvious feminist points here, yet they were absent from the program last night, even as some of these sorts of issues were raised.

-dredgirl

velcro attached penises may be the way of the future ;)

So my dear friend at “fuckpoliteness” has come under the hammer for daring to say that the world would be a better place if men had “velcro-attached penises”. Her post has been attached to a BBC women’s hour discussion about misandry (aka, the hate of men) .  Her humour has been labelled violence and discussed as quivalent to the violence of male sexist “humour”.

I think this misses the point. To level out the political implications of sexist male humour (which is an everyday occurance and generally accepted), and this particular post is to fail to understand the different historical positions which inform contemporary situations. The humour deployed by fuckpoliteness is an attempt to subvert dominant power relations, whereas the “humour” used by men against women, or stereotyping women, is offensive and reaffirms the status-quo. This is a fundamental difference. Fuckpoliteness is challenging hegemony.

Goodnight!

-dredgirl

martha wainwright

martha wainwright: ‘bloody motherfucking arsehole’

Betraying the Patriarchy

I have been posting some short poems I have written. These particular poems are about love, but they are reflective of the violence of love, the gendered violence of love within patriarchal family structures. It occured to me that as I did this I felt that I was betraying someone or something. I felt a tremendous guilt, as if it was unfair to be saying ‘fuck you’ to the perpetrator of the violence, who in this instance is my father.

I feel guilt in betraying the patriarchal figure of my life. So I reflect on this and begin to think through the structural which extends beyond my personal situation, informing it but exceeding it. It is in thinking the larger system of what bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that I am able to release my guilt, or convert that guilty energy into a creative force for positive change.

I am learning to betray the patriarchy. I am learning how to fuck it up by telling its truths. There is always context to violence, the violence is always complicated. It is this that I want to get to, to unpick and understand, maybe even to forgive. I think that requires showing its full force, without pulling any punches.

-dredgirl

another poem…

today i listened to the air

and the sky was clear

blue

more blue than i can ever recall

even though

inside the home

behind the curtains

contained by the fibro walls

my mother’s crying

shook me

and the air vibrated with her wailing

and my tears fell without a sound

and my heart quietly folded

a short poem

Do you remember

how when the rain began

the curtains rose with the strong winds

the glass wobbled just a little

and we’d hurry to close the windows and the door?

I remember standing there

thinking that the world was without a shell

as the rain hit the roof

and you sat there in the same chair

as you had the day before

your eyes looking beyond me

even as your words

brought tears to my own.

I retreated into myself

but discovered in

was the wrong way out

and so I turned away

and let the rain hit my face.

Thinking feminism

The issue of feminism is one of central importance for me. I was reading L’s wonderful blog post on Passionate Politics, which draws on bell hook’s feminist work, and it reminded me of the feeling I first had when I “discovered” feminism around 7 or 8 years ago. It was during my time as an undergrad student at a Sydney university, and I was feeling out of my depth intellectually as well as feeling a distinct class-ism, which we are told doesn’t exist in classless Australia, but I can assure you I felt daily for many years (and still experience to varying degrees, although I have climbed the ladder a little, so to speak). On L’s blog I commented that for me hooks provided a language with which to understand the struggles and experiences I had engaged with most of my life. This is no exaggeration. I have been raised in a broadly defined patriarchal society yes, but I have also experienced intense patriarachal violence in the home; the sort of violence we relegate to the private sphere and demand silence of. Don’t speak of this violence, we are told time and time again as children and teenagers, it is private, nobody elses business. And I did abide by this rule for many years until a close friend whose father had also been violent (her mother, unlike my own, did escape the violence when she was young) said to me: “Don’t keep his secrets, spread the word, that arsehole doesn’t deserve your loyalty”. Or something to that effect. Of course, family is a complex issue and it is never easy to get a clean break, but I have made an active choice to voice my experiences. Yet, why is it that my mind doubts itself when I say “We live in a patriarchal society”? Why is it that I feel the need to provide evidence for this claim? That I am wrong? I think this demonstrates the power of patriarchy, but I also think in some ways this is the result of the dominance of “postfeminism”, that brand of so-called feminist thinking that starts from the assumption of equality and is merely concerned with propping up consumerism (realise your full identity as a woman buy buying it!). Postfeminism doesn’t speak of living in a male-dominated world. It also seems to be a specifically ‘Western’ idea; it speaks of the equality granted to privileged women, failing to acknowledge the global condition of women, or the way in which women’s experiences are differentiated according to race, class, sexuality, ability etc. even in these privileged nation-states.

So, anyway, I returned to hooks, reading a little of her collection “Outlaw Culture” (1994), where she is really aiming to critique and challenge the “mindset of neo-colonialism” that “shapes the underlying metaphysics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. She goes to to suggest that “[c]ultural criticism can be an agent for change, educating for critical consciousness in librartory ways, [but] only if we start with a mind-set and a progressive politics that is fundamentally anticolonialist, that negates cultural imperialism in all its manifestations” (7).

Postfeminism commodifies difference, but in doing so it refuses it. As if reading my mind, hooks summarises this perfectly:

“new Feminism” is being brought to us as a product that works effectively to set women against one another, to engage us in competition wars over which brand of feminism is more effective. Large numbers of feminist thinkers and activists oppose the exploitative, hedonistic consumerism that is repackaging feminism as a commodity and selling it to us full of toxic components (a little bit of poisonous, patriarchal thinking sprinkled here and there), but we feel powerless to change this trend (86).

So as usual, I will end this post, and return to it later, but what I wanted to do was think about how the idea of feminism I want to promote and advocate requires an acknowledgement of race, sexuality etc, and also demands a renewed attention to capitalism: how capitalism in its current stage of neo-liberalism has reshaped feminism, as well as how feminists need to dismantle or “jam” this system…

-dredgirl

Gruen Transfer II

Last night Wil Anderson told us that the point of the program The Gruen Transfer is to provide a scalpel to the advertising industry to discover what is underneath. Apparently it is through his comic genuis that we will be given some cutting-edge social commentary. To me, the half-hour feels more like a free consultation by the advertising big-wigs who can tell us ‘what works and what doesn’t, and why’. Now, if the program was aiming to do this, to merely reiterate a range of stereotypes in adjudicating whether or not advertisements work, I would not take issue. But, we are promised more. We are promised some degree of critique and challenge, or at least this is how I read Andrew Denton’s comment (the program is bankrolled by Denton’s company):

“The Gruen Transfer is not so black and white…It’s not about whether advertising is good or evil. What we’re interested in is simple: how advertising works and what it says about us. I’ve always thought that advertising is an amazing and complex world. It deserves more attention than it usually gets from television, which is the ‘World’s Wackiest Commercials’ approach.” (Please see here for reference)

Agreed. But this show does not offer such an approach. It does not ask us to “unlearn” (I refer here to Denton’s quirky little ad - aired just before The Gruen Transfer - where he tells us he wants us to unlearn everything we think we know). As a tutor in cultural studies, i spend plenty of time teaching students about the semotics of advertising; I teach them about the social politics of representation, often discussing the gendered and racialised aspects of media in general, and advertising in particular. In the courses I teach on, we ask students to unlearn, to defamiliarise themselves with the representations and experiences they may take as natural, normal or common. Unlearning is often experienced as uncomfortable, as an affront, or critique of privilege (whether it be race privilege, gender privilge, class privilege etc), but it can also be incredibly invigorating, allowing students to see the world differently.

The Gruen Transfer does not promote such an ethos of unlearning. Perhaps it does not really aim to. Perhaps the format (a comedy program) is not compatible with such an agenda. Last night was no exception. A ten minute discussion of 4 WD drive ads merely reinforced gender determinism (men like big cars and rugged representations/women like softer versions to accommodate their growing family in the suburbs), and even included a charming little joke by Wil Anderson that one of the women in a particular 4WD ad looked like a butch lesbian mother (was that company targeting the butch lesbian market? Anderson asked). Anderson’s only critique came when he declared that the ads were crap (his problem seemed to be that they were unrealistic in their representation of masculinity). 4WD ads do posit an unrealistic version of masculinity, but they also draw on a representation of man as conquerer, dominant and powerful, able to tame the environment. This representation has cultural capital and influence.

The only interesting part of the show was the screening of an ad featuring the actress Emma Thompson. The ad is aimed at generating awareness about global sex trafficking and is extraordinarily graphic and confronting. Wil asked his expert panel if they thought the ad was successful, they each answered, either in teh affirmative or negative, but little more was offered.

I think my problem with this show is that it doesn’t recognise advertising as a powerful industry complicit in various forms of symbolic and material violence. It takes ads out of context or only wants to read them in partial context. It effects a sort of individualising, where each ad is taken separately. it doesn’t really seek to tell us what the ads tell us about gender, sexuality, race or politics at all in our times, or how advertising is political and does influence, consolidate and benefit from the reproduction of norms. Advertising doesn’t want us to ‘unlearn’ as this would undermine it too greatly. Having a concept for a show which involves a panel of employed advertisers probably isn’t going to give us this.