Bigot-o-grams

I've received a few pieces of mail from Olivia Chow's campaign since the election: a volunteer thank-you party invititation, and stuff like that.

Yesterday, I got a letter: the return address indicated it came from the "Olivia Chow Re-Election Campaign". I opened it up, and across the top it reads "From the desk of Michele Landsberg."

Ugh.

This Michele Landsberg:

What makes a woman? If a man cuts off his penis, pumps himself full of hormones, gets silicone breasts and electrolysis, and stuffs his feet into high heels, is he/she a woman?

To me, that surgically and chemically altered person is a walking testament to the craziness of our cultural rigidity. If all children weren't crammed into pink or blue categories, with prescribed sets of feelings, beliefs and behaviours, maybe the gender-ambiguous wouldn't be driven to such painfully harsh medical extremes. Would that everyone could live freely, in freely chosen sexual modes, without mutilations and lifelong chemicals.

Being female is a complicated mixture of physiology, cultural conditioning and lived experience -- or even, as one academic thesis would have it, "a political category created through oppression." Out of politeness, I'd be willing to call that surgically altered person a woman and use the feminine pronoun. But a part of me will always feel outraged that "woman" could be defined as an outward set of physical characteristics - lack of penis, fake breasts - along with an ultra-sexist "female impersonator" style of clothing and gesture.

She wrote this in a Toronto Star article talking about the Kimberly Nixon/Vancouver Rape Relief case. The article closes by likening Nixon's resistance to being discriminated against to rape -- to her forcing herself on an organization that has said 'no'.

The letter goes on to ask for my help in helping Olivia pay down her campaign expenses (I cannot legally give her campaign any more money, so the plea is not particularly well-aimed).

Y'know: I know that NDP'ers don't have to all agree on party policy. But I support the NDP because I believe that opinions like Landsberg's are anathema to them. And I would hate to learn otherwise.

Wiscon Day 2: The middle, kinda

I went to lunch with Ian H. -- it almost turned into a group with lcohen and Geoff Ryman, but no -- and afterward, we went to catch the tail end of the Farmer's Market, where we gabbed about popcorn and activism. I missed the first timeslot of panels. I'd circled both "Assimilation and the Immigrant Grandchild" and "This is What Democracy Looks Like: The Wisconsin Protests" in my programme book, but alas.

The first panel of the afternoon that I made it to was:

The Self-Reflective Revolutionary

Many revolutionaries discount personal issues. For example, many Marxists claim that family of origin issues will disappear once we "fire the bosses." Many revolutions, however, collapse due to the egos of revolutionaries unwilling to recognize that they might become (or already be) part of the problem. At best, overthrowing a society might require different skills than governing one -- and at worst, we might become new bosses, only slightly different (or even worse) than the old ones. Does focus on analysis of society prevent us from looking at ourselves as individuals? Does personal growth work obliviate us to politics and the effects of our society on individuals? Is it scarier to look into a mirror or the mechanics of oppressive state power? Is self-reflection a luxury?

Ian K. Hagemann, Paul Bietila, Timmi Duchamp, Josh Lukin, Elana Tabachnick

I said later to Ian that I'd never seen him in a panel that was terrible before. And it's true. Before that panel, I'd never seen him in a panel that was awful. Ah, wistfulness.

Okay, so what happened? I thought that Ian gave a great intro to the panel. He cited autobiographies of a lot of major activists -- Emma Goldman, Dr. King, Malcolm X -- who were often criticized for what appeared to be personal failings. What should we learn from these people? Do these failings harm their activism? To some extent, it seems that they do.

I enjoyed Timmi's introduction -- in particular, she alluded to having a transformative experience after getting arrested and going to trial. I hoped to hear more about this story, but, sadly, the panel never returned to it.

The panel sort of got awkward after Elana did her introduction. She situated herself as playing the voice of opposition on the panel. She argued, from a fairly religious perspective, that the opposite was true. That inside work -- working on one's self -- was crucial, but that doing outside, activist work actually contributed to making the world less peaceful and more problematic. Just after introductions, she read out a position statement of a few pages, that spelled out her argument. She never quite stated, explicitly, which religious tradition she came from, but I think she was a Buddhist, and she did describe herself as an active monastic. I think the position statement went a bit too long, and I think the panel really never got back to the topic in a real way after that. The panel was marked by lots of awkward silence, as if people just didn't really know what to say after that.

The audience threw out some nice comments. The idea that change is usually prompted by unreasonable people came up. One woman (I didn't catch her name) mentioned that just because people are talking about revolution doesn't mean we should view it as positive. The Khmer Rouge probably thought that they were building a better society. At one point the panelists seemed to write "bad revolutions" off as a failing of groupthink, and the same audience member talked about how some of the Nazis weren't caught up in groupthink: they were actually really thoughtful. They had qualms about killing groups of Jewish children but steeled themselves with the belief that it was necessary to get to the master race. "Groupthink" isn't the right model to analyze these phenomena.

But the panelists never really had the same focus after Elana's comments. Mostly, I felt like they just wanted it all to end. And part of me wonders about that. I've certainly watched Ian play the role of contrarian before. There was a panel about porn, oh, ten years ago, maybe? Ian and Nalo and Mary Anne. And Ian was deliberately arguing a position he didn't believe about why restricting porn might be a good thing. It ended up being a really interesting panel.

Why not this time? Partially, Elena's points weren't actually arguable. For example, she made this pretty metaphor about water in a jar floating in a stormy lake. And people try to throw rocks at the lake to get it to calm down. But a pretty metaphor isn't really an argument. ("Yes it is!") How do you respond to that except to say, "I think that's bunk"? It seemed like a bad starting position for a conversation.

I'm not an atheist, and I often haven't really valued the tendency among many atheists I know to be harsh to theists. Mostly, I don't really get why atheists care what religious people believe. Maybe if I lived in the States, I'd feel differently. But here was a case where I kinda felt like to get anywhere on this panel, you had to be a bit blunt about rejecting Elena's premise. But no one was comfortable going there. So the panel... kinda blew.

For my part, I kept thinking about Elena's comments in the context of Vodou and the Haitian Revolution. I think that Vodou is a religion that encourages radical agency. And I think that it is a central element of the Haitian Revolution. I mean, the Vodou ceremony at Bwa Kayiman is usually regarded as the beginning of the Haitian Revolution.

Whatever. Afterward, I went to "Slacktivism":

If Someone You Know Has Been Affected by Slacktivism, Please Post This as Your Status

Retweeting, changing your userpic, uploading a video... is this just a substitute for actual activism? Is this "slactivism" helpful or hurtful? Are some methods better than others? Does it depend on the cause? Does it matter who started the meme? How do we counter slacktivism or move beyond it to effect real change?

Alan Bostick, Andy Best, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman, Rosemary / Sophy, Xakara

I didn't stay for this panel for very long. There were a coupl'a audience members who were monopolizing the conversation, and I wasn't in the mood for what they had to say, so I ducked out.

So, not a terribly productive afternoon.

I ended up going to dinner at the restaurant in the museum, and had one of the tastiest meals I've had in a long, long time. The evenings were surprisingly panel-free.