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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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Citizenship Politics and Hierarchies in Animal Rights Activism and Oppression

I’ve been mulling over two really great pieces on animal liberation and the animal rights movement these past couple of weeks.

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Aph Ko: Afrofuturism and Black Veganism: Towards a New Citizenship at the Intersectional Justice Conference

Aph’s work on Aphro-ism and Black Vegans Rock is awesome, and this video is really important. I’ve been wanting to post this ever since it came out. I finally finished captioning it, so now you can view it on Amara in English. I also put the captions into a slightly edited transcript if you’d rather read her talk. Her description: “In my talk, I discuss how intersectionality is a useful tool for navigating current oppressive systems, and how Afrofuturism is a brilliant tool for creating conceptual blueprints for tomorrow.”

Aph touches on a lot of things and the video in itself is impactful, so I recommend just watching it all the way through (content warning for racial violence and imagery), but I’ll try to sum up some main points:

Intersectionality as “social layerism”

Citizenship politics

Racial and animal oppression

Afrofuturism and imagining freedom

Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model

Intersectionality as “social layerism”

I think we need to re-evaluate the ways that we think systems of oppression are connecting, because currently, I can tell that some activists are struggling to articulate how and why these issues are entangled, and instead, they try to engage with a type of analysis that I call "social layerism", […] when activists try to enact a type of intersectional analysis, but they just end up superficially layering these issues on top of one another without any meaningful connection or analysis. So that basically means that a lot of people are saying anti-racism, feminism, speciesism, all in the same sentence, which is a really big deal, but there's not really a lot of work being done on connecting these things conceptually.

Aph mentions a popular video, On Intersectionality in Feminism and Pizza, where Akilah uses pizza made from animals’ products and animals’ bodies to explain intersectionality, as an extreme example of social layerism. Akilah is literally talking about a pizza with toppings and not making any connections between feminine and animal oppression (see Carol J. Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat), or any other type of oppression, instead explaining intersectionality as additional layers of issues that aren’t connected or entangled. Although intersectionality has become mainstream, its meaning hasn’t really translated into our social movements.

Citizenship politics

Aph explains how the compartmentalized, single-issue movements of today – feminism, anti-racism, animal rights, etc. – prevent more meaningful connections between oppression to take place. She brings up the the issue of physical borders as a concrete example of citizenship politics, and also as an analogy to the policing that happens within different types of activist spaces. She gives examples of the vitriolic reaction against Black Vegans Rock that white and non-Black minorities have had.

A lot of vegans who believed that veganism was in their possession, in particular, a part of white citizen identity. A lot of white people felt like they unquestionably had access to, and could be the gatekeepers over, veganism, and that Black people who talked about race in conjunction with veganism were crossing a border […] that white folks created, and our racialized discussions about animal rights were threatening them and their current citizenship to the landscape of animal rights. Our attempts at talking about race and animal at the same time was viewed as deviant, wrong, and barbaric. We had to do it "the right way". We had to go through the right channels to become a proper animal rights activist, which meant adopting Eurocentric ideas about animal oppression, Black oppression, and more. If you do talk about race as a person of color, or if you create your own project, your citizenship to the animal rights space is interrogated, and you're viewed as not belonging, and being inhospitable as a guest to their white space. You're basically told to "go back from where you came from," which were these, like, weird, Brown, anti-racist spaces, 'cause white people didn't talk about race in the vegan world, right? It was, leave your race out of this, this has nothing to do with race.

Aph also talks about the hyperresentation of certain Black folks in veganism and animals rights that are held up as examples of "proper citizens” who’ve been “rehabilitated” and have “transcended race talk”. In essence, “Eurocentric post-racial veganism is being used to superficially show Black bodies in a way where Blackness isn't even really central or discussed, but used as a tool to facilitate a violent form of diversity that serves as a sedative for Black rage.”

Racial and animal oppression

Aph talks about the documentary film, “Always in Season”, that she’s an associate producer on. This was a really emotional part of her talk, since it demonstrated how normalized lynching was not too long ago, and how Black people were (and sometimes still are) considered sub-human and animal.

As many as 15,000 people would be at one lynching. And you have to multiply that by 5,000 documented lynchings that have taken place. And like I said, those are only the documented ones. Experts say there were 2-3 times as many. And this is an image – luckily, you can’t see it too well – but in the center is a 17 year old Black boy named Jesse Washington, who is being tortured and burned in Waco, Texas in 1916. This form of terrorism was so highly organized that they even had postcards they created. […] So this is the front of a postcard, and there’s a guy right here. He was the one sending the postcard. He marked himself in it. They were not afraid to even show their faces. That’s how normalized this was. And at the back of this postcard, to his father, he wrote, “This is the barbecue we had last night.”

This film is about what Black and white people had to live with then, and what they’re living with now. Lynching was like hunting, however, no licenses were required, which meant that Black folks were always in season, which is why it’s titled that way. So I don’t think Black oppression is “like” animal oppression, I argue that it’s a part of it. If Black people are considered sub-human and animal, then what they’re experiencing is also, I argue, animal oppression. So when animal rights activists from the dominating class keep telling people like me that Black people are “centering” ourselves in an animal rights movements that’s supposed to be about animals, you have to realize that Black people intimately understand what it means to be hunted and terrorized. And as long as Black activists are making the necessary connections to animal oppression, then animal oppression will be a product of our racial liberation movements, considering racism, I argue, is also a speciesist thing.

Aph and her sister Syl have argued for an epistemological revolution (see Why Animal Liberation Requires an Epistemological Revolution). Instead of viewing oppressions as manifesting independently and then connecting with other oppressions in the similarity of their material violations, we need to realize that the root of all oppression is due to citizenship in the territory of “sub-human” or “other” that is inferior to the dominant class (“glorified white humans”).

Afrofuturism and imagining freedom

Part of the power that the dominant society has is being able to take away your imagination such that the way the world is given to you is the only way it can ever be, and the only movement you can ever really do in that system is to get more comfortable. The way white supremacist patriarchy has defined us is seemingly all we can ever be as minorities.

When the system steals your imagination, they have arrested your future. Most of us are so caught up in the fight today, especially in intersectional circles, we’re so caught up in the fight and the language of oppression that we’ve kind of forgotten that this fight is supposed to be temporary. We cannot start building homes in our trenches. We are only here temporarily. Eventually, the goal is, we want to climb out and build a new landscape, because, remember, that’s the goal. It’s not just to stay in the fight just to fight, but it’s to get out and find a space that’s revolutionary.

Aph introduces Afrofuturism as a path forward from becoming a decolonized being to shaping society after liberation has been achieved.

Liberation isn't the end, it is merely the outcome of revolution. However, we can't forget to start planning for the day after our liberation comes, because that's the day when we have to build a new system, and a new society, and we have to start working on that blueprint today. And the day after liberation is the day that we're most vulnerable, so we need to create some conceptual architecture for tomorrow.

Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model

So in a lot of our movements today – even our intersectional movement – we assume that white people are at the center of our solar system, and we orbit them. And so this has produced, in my opinion, a "Dear white people," type of activism – and that's a film – where the only way minorities can get any rights or anything done is through white people. And in order for liberation, we have to educate them. This is even why people say "women and people of color". Where does that leave me? “Women and people of color.” Even in intersectional movements, we say this because these are descriptors for bodies that are not white men. So this is again: they are at the center of our universe. And I'm arguing that we need to move to a model that's similar to the heliocentric model, which says that we do not orbit whiteness. White supremacy orbits us, and inferior beings, in order to exist, grow, and thrive. There is no white supremacy if there is no anti-Blackness. Just as the earth needs the sun's light to thrive and grow, systems of oppression need sub-humans in order to feel superior.

I know many in the room would call that intersectional. I'm calling that an Afrofuturistic politic. And what's interesting about the heliocentric model, again, is that the sun is a conglomeration of all beings that are labeled inferior, sub-human, and animal. And my sister Syl […] says, "Racism, sexism, ableism, speciesism, classism, and so on… These are real phenomena, of course, but as philosopher Sylvia Wynter warned, we should avoid mistaking the 'maps' for the 'territory'. The territory is the massive domain of Others, whose scope can only be grasped when we dig deeper to go beyond the constraints of the specific -isms and see ourselves as – following Frantz Fanon's words – damned beings by virtue of lacking of full 'human' status." And that's what connects a lot of us who are labeled oppressed: in addition to non-human animals, we're viewed as sub-human.

Aph explores the reimagination of citizenship within an Afrofuturistic framework for everyone labeled inferior. With this framework, racial liberation movements will tackle animal oppression – those with citizenship in the same domain of Others, with their intimate knowledge of what it means to be sub-human, will be the authors of change, creating new conceptual architectures for the future.

The power of Afrofuturism is that it's model-less. There is no model. It's ambiguous. And its power lies in that ambiguity because there are no structures, there are no leaders, there are no hierarchies, which I would argue are the foundational elements for systems of oppression. It's about reimagining your citizenship beyond white supremacy and patriarchy.

Animal Liberation: Devastate to Liberate, or Devastatingly Liberal? by Anonymous By liberating ourselves, from the oppressive chains of causes, identities and ideology of group politics, we may stop walking round towns looking for animal abuse and instead aim for how to rid ourselves of the behaviour which currently reproduces the state and class divided society in our own activity.

27. Of course the idea of a cruelty free product is a carefully crafted illusion. No such thing can exist — all commodities are cruel. Every single thing that can be bought, every service, every item of food, every household good, every house, road or car has been produced with the forced slavery of working class people. The predominance of middle class people who make up the animal rights movement ignore this because they tend not to have to suffer half as much in society themselves. Even if you were only interested in cruelty in regard to animals (a trait with a perplexing popularity amongst the human members of the animal rights movement), how could you avoid using animal in rubber, glues or on photographic film? This isn’t mentioned to make anyone feel bad about taking photos or whatever but merely to show that the notion of being a “true vegan” in this society is an impossible goal. We didn’t choose for it to be that way, we don’t use such things deliberately for that reason — under this economic system we simply have no control over such a thing.

55. It tends to go without saying but there is every reason to combat hierarchy when it rears its ugly head because hierarchy is precisely the trait which keeps humans in a dominating position over animals. The concept of speciesism, like racism and sexism, is nothing other than a specific application of authoritative power. If it were approached as such then perhaps, perhaps, the animal rights movement wouldn’t be so full of the liberal / fascist nonsense it is today.

62. As soon as any movement around a specific cause develops committees, officers, group contacts etc, it starts to develop a division of status and its campaigners begin to behave like governments. As long as the issue is seen to be animal rights then hierarchical tendencies will crop up and be tolerated. As long as individuals refuse to think about what exactly hierarchy is, and recognise that hierarchy is the crucial king-pin holding all of us, and animals into the roles of the oppressed, then the well-meaning efforts of libertarian liberationists will continually be in vain.

This was something that I came across at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair a few weeks ago, and I think it speaks a lot to the animal rights movement and social movements in general that this anonymous author’s critique of animal rights in England in the early 1990s is basically the same problem of citizenship politics that Aph critiques in her talk in 2016: “It's all about where you fit in. Who's doing it right, who's doing it wrong, whether you're an abolitionist or a welfarist, whether you're intersectional or decolonial. It becomes less about the actual oppression, and more about power. Who is right, and who is wrong? Who belongs, and who doesn't?”

Our movements reproduce the same power structures that underly the oppression that we’re fighting because we’re operating under the same Eurocentric, capitalist models. Recognizing that the human/animal divide – that hierarchy and power gradients – is the linchpin of oppression is the first step in imagining a future for ourselves.

#animal rights #activism #veganism #intersectionality #afrofuturism #anarchism #articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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What I Read Today(ish)

When Robots Are An Instrument Of Male Desire by Katherine Cross “When customers and managers talk about ironing out the ‘inefficiency’ of human employees, it seems they mainly want to erase the inconvenience of human sapience: the idea that you as a worker have a will and body of your own that, even while you’re on the clock, does not exist to serve ‘the customer’s’ every whim. I’d argue there’s a connection between how many men want to be ‘free’ to sexually harass Cortana or Siri, and the fact that we are in the midst of an epidemic of sexual harassment of restaurant workers worldwide, the majority of whom are women. The link lies in what many consumers are trained to expect from service workers: perfect subservience and total availability. Our virtual assistants, free of messy things like autonomy, emotion, and dignity, are the perfect embodiment of that expectation.”

Organizing for radical change beyond the ballot box by Ben Reynolds “By organizing ourselves, we build our own power to resist capitalism and fight for a better future. Crucially, we keep power in our communities instead of ceding it to party bureaucracies and the state.”

#EarthDay: The High Cost Of Eco-Activism by Nurith Aizenman “[…] some of the most vital environmental work is being done by ordinary citizens with extraordinary courage. People like subsistence farmers and tribal leaders in the poorest countries are standing up to some of the world’s most powerful industries. And a growing number of them have been attacked — and sometimes murdered — for trying to protect the environment.”

Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'My book has something to offend everyone’ by Angela Chen “Nguyen was adamant from the beginning that his novel would not fall into the ‘typical maneuvers of minority literature written for a majority audience’. He refused to translate his culture – for example, writing ‘Vietnamese New Year’ instead of ‘Tết’ – or have the book’s themes affirm American ideals and American exceptionalism. Had The Sympathizer been written for a white audience, the ‘ending would be radically different’. His narrator never rejects communism, for example. ‘I wrote as if I had all the privilege of a majority writer, and majority writers never have to translate or pander,’ Nguyen said.”

How To Respond When You Suspect Someone Is Flirting With You by Mallory Ortberg “Are you cheerfully enduring this interaction, or a willing participant? I can’t distinguish good humor from genuine interest. Give me a sign.”

#articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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Made zines with friends yesterday! It was a lot of fun! Mine was on animal rights and asexuality. I’ve been thinking about the connection between the two these past couple of weeks, as a few of us from the Bay Area LGBTQ+ Animal Liberationists were preparing for a panel on “Intersections In Oppressions and How To Be An Ally”. The presentation was geared towards folks who are well-versed in animal rights but may not know as much about LGBTQ+ issues and the connections between the two. As beings who are “othered”, there are many similarities between the denial of LGBTQ+ identities/devaluation of LGBTQ+ lives and the denial of animals’ personhoods/devaluation of their lives.

The 3Ns are fairly well-known in the animal rights and vegan communities from Melanie Joy’s book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. Melanie remarks on how the 3Ns – natural, normal, and necessary – have been used to justify many other exploitative systems and oppressions throughout history. For example, the 3Ns are often what people use to justify homophobia, saying how being gay is “unnatural”, “abnormal”, and “unnecessary”.

In 2015, a group of researchers published Rationalising Meat Consumption, which added another N – nice – to make 4Ns. “Nice” is an interesting rationalization because it’s not admitted as often, and it doesn’t apply as nicely to justifications for oppressive systems like homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, etc. It’s used all the time to justify asexual erasure, though (because sex is just so nice, why wouldn’t everyone like it?). There’s a fear of “missing out” that often comes with perceiving that something is nice.

Anyways, zines are fun and exciting and I want to make more! We used the one-sheet-of-paper technique (not sure what the technique is actually called, woops) from How to Make a Zine.

#animal rights #asexual #asexuality #zine

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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Asexuality, Race, and Community

A couple weeks ago at the Empowering Women of Color Conference in Berkeley, I hosted a workshop/presentation on the history of asexuality and the online community and the conversations about race and (a)sexuality that have been ongoing. The presentation is in Google Drive: Asexuality, Race, and Community.

There are a lot of slides! It ended up as multiple timelines, first of asexual awareness and the emergence of online communities, second of asexuality in the media, and third of conversations about asexuality and race within ace communities. We see that these conversations are either around increasing awareness of racialized (a)sexuality (including calling out racism within ace communities), sharing of experiences as APOC, or calls for spaces for APOC. We’ve been having these conversations since 2011 or so, and we may still be in the “raising awareness” stage of not only race and asexuality, but asexuality in general. It’ll be interesting to see what other spaces for aces of color will be created in the future.

Some topics that came up after the presentation:

Sex-positivity and asexuality. While sex-positivity at its core is about the ability for sex to be a positive experience, it can be difficult for people to accept sex-positivity as it’s currently framed – especially mainstream sex-positivity which has the tendency to frame all consensual sex as positive – since it tends to ignore the experiences of people of color along with aces. I’ve stopped identifying as sex-positive and now tend to say that I’m sex-critical or sex-negative. One of my favorite articles of all time is by Lisa at A Radical TransFeminist, who wrote The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism. Sex-positive feminism opposes sex moralism, "the controlled right of male sexual (and otherwise) access to women, in which people acting sexually outside of that controlled system are considered shameful and dirty,” whereas sex-negative feminism opposes compulsory sexuality, “a set of social attitudes, institutions and practices which hold and enforce the belief that everyone should have or want to have frequent sex (of a socially approved kind).” As Lisa frames it, sex-negative feminism isn’t the opposite of sex-positivity, but another way to oppose how women and their bodies are policed. Another good article I like is by Jo at A life unexamined, who wrote Sex-Positivity, Compulsory Sexuality and Intersecting Identities. Online ace communities are generally sex-positive (since it’s the prevailing liberal viewpoint), but there have been a lot of interesting conversations around asexuality and sex-positivity, and more discussions around being critical about sex and being sex-neutral have been happening.

Asexual relationships. I think this is something that most people are most curious about in terms of asexuality, including ace folks. How do relationships work with people who aren’t asexual? I wrote about Asexual/Allosexual Relationships for Ace Awareness Week last year. I’m a bit biased as a sex-averse ace, so while I fervently defend the ability of asexuals to enthusiastically consent to sex and believe that consenting to sex doesn’t require sexual attraction, I also think there needs to be more space for asexuals for whom sex is a deal-breaker.

What the ace community has to offer. There are topics of significant importance to asexuals – some of the big ones being consent and relationships – that are also important to people who aren’t asexual. For instance, critiques of sex-positivity have contributed to discussions around sex. I wrote a bit on Asexuality for Allosexuals for Ace Awareness Week last year, too. It references an article by Mary Maxfield Brave, Sp[ace] Exploration: What Sexual People Can Learn from Asexual Communities, that I thought was really cool.

Thanks to everyone who helped me with the presentation, and thanks to the folks at EWOCC and everyone who attended! The conference in and of itself was awesome. The panel on gentrification was particularly noteworthy, and it was cool just to be in a space with a majority of women and non-binary people of color.

(Quick note: I linked to all the sources I used in each slide in the speaker’s notes, so take a look at those if you’re interested in where I got all the information. A lot of it came from articles linked from cassz’s Asexuality and Race Resources document, and most of the general history tidbits were pulled from AVENwiki.)

#asexuality #asexual #apoc #aces of color #ewocc

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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What I Read Today(ish)

I’m currently going through StyleLikeU’s What's Underneath video series, which is super cool and touching and vulnerable. Particularly liked Alok’s video, The Pain & Empowerment of Choosing Your Own Gender, and Tyler’s, Move Over, Gender Binary!

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Where the Vocabulary of Autism is Failing by Nicholette Zeliadt “Terms like ‘low-functioning’ are short on nuance and long on stigma.”

Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter by Yasmin Nair “Twitter is mistaken as a form of political action, and the fact that tweeting has the appearance of unmediated immediacy gives it the legitimacy of authenticity, a hallmark of the neoliberal entrepreneurial self.”

Justice for All by Brian Goldstone “Ending the scourge of mass incarceration will require seeking justice not just for the innocent but for the guilty.”

The Reckoning by Pamela Colloff “Fifty years ago, when Claire Wilson was eighteen, she was critically wounded during the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting—the first massacre of its kind. How does the path of a bullet change a life?"

Black Trauma Remixed For Your Clicks by Neila Orr “In viral videos, the real-life pain of black people is repurposed into fun, catchy songs for popular consumption. But at what cost?”

#articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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What I Read Today(ish)

OpenToonz is here!!

My Mother’s Garden by Kaitlyn Greenidge “I learned that the best person to talk about wealth and class was an upper-middle class person because she supposedly could look at it dispassionately. The best person to talk about race was a white person, for the same reasons. The best person to talk about gender was a boy.”

Series of Animated Stories Revitalize Indigenous Languages in Mexico by Iris Rodriguez “The project aims to promote pride, respect, and encourage the use of the indigenous languages of Mexico, through a series of animated stories narrated in these languages and subtitled in Spanish.”

The Radical Raging Grannies of San Jose by Teresa Mathew “Many echo each other in saying that the Grannies simply target injustice wherever they find it. ‘We go to any gig where we are needed,’ Essie says. ‘We are an unstructured, radical group of older women who say what they want.’”

My Year in Startup Hell by Dan Lyons Channeling Orwell? “Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Dharmesh first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said ‘1 + 1 = 3.’ Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR, tells me, ‘I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.’”

Water’s Edge by Taffy Brodesser-Akner “The story of Bill May, the greatest male synchronized swimmer who ever lived, and his improbable quest for Olympic gold.”

#articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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What I Read Today(ish)

Currently in San Diego at CSUN! Had the opportunity to take Paul J. Adam’s mobile accessibility workshop (check out his awesome list of a11y resources). San Diego is beautiful, by the way.

Also, many thanks to everyone who’s shared and replied with their experiences on my posts about Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality and Asexuality and Race in a Digital World.

A Letter to My Chinese Immigrant Father About American Racism by Lucy Lee “In these moments, when I feel ready to hurl out angry accusations of complicity and anti-Black racism, I try to think about the loneliness you and mom might have felt as new immigrants in a country that viewed you only in caricature. I think about how you left behind a family that idolized you, to live among strangers who dismissed you as subservient, alien, and irrelevant. I think about how you might have felt as young parents, waking up in the middle of the night to robbers breaking into your apartment with a newborn sound asleep.”

Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco by Rebecca Solnit “Alex Nieto was 28 years old when he was killed, in the neighbourhood where he had spent his whole life. He died in a barrage of bullets fired at him by four San Francisco policemen. There are a few things about his death that everyone agrees on: he was in a hilltop park eating a burrito and tortilla chips, wearing the Taser he carried for his job as a bouncer at a nightclub, when someone called 911 on him a little after 7pm on the evening of 21 March 2014.”

In Indonesia, Knitting Gets Political by Theodora Sutcliffe Artist Fitriani Dalay is using knitting and yarn-bombing “to challenge consumerism, censorship, and elitism in the political and art worlds, while empowering women.”

How Can White Teachers Do Better by Urban Kids of Color? by Christopher Emdin “First, the belief that students are in need of ‘cleaning up’ presumes that they are dirty. Second, the aim of ‘giving them a better life’ indicates that their present life has little or no value. The idea that one individual or school can give students ‘a life’ emanates from a problematic savior complex that results in making students, their varied experiences, their emotions, and the good in their communities invisible. So invisible, in fact, that the chief way to teach urban youth of color more effectively—that is, to truly be in and in touch with their communities—is not seen as a viable option.”

Facial Recognition Apps Are Leaving Blind People Behind by Jonathan Keane “Biometric logins like facial recognition are often discussed as being the real alternative to traditional passwords. But as companies develop apps that verify identity with a snapshot of the user's face, few are considering whether that method is accessible to people with visual impairments.”

#articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality

I was introduced to the concept of hermeneutical injustice a couple days ago and it’s been blowing my mind. I’ve been struggling for a while to reconcile consent and asexuality, specifically in the context where asexuality isn’t known. If asexuality isn’t an option, how can someone’s consent be truly free? Anagnori’s post on Asexuality and Consent Issues sums it up well:

Consent can only be freely given when all people involved are mentally, physically, socially and financially able to say “No.” An imbalance of power or of information limits the options that one of the partners can take, and it casts doubt on the voluntariness of the relationship. […] How many asexual people consent to sex that they would not have consented to if they grew up knowing that asexuality was a good, normal, and healthy way to be? How many people are pressured or manipulated into sex because they believe that they need to be fixed?

Queenie’s post on Mapping the grey area of sexual experience: consent, compulsory sexuality, and sex normativity shows how prevalent these experiences are:

I’ve had countless conversations with other aces who felt pressured into sex before they discovered asexuality, not necessarily because their partner was standing over them saying, “You must have sex with me or the heavens will smite you with thunderbolts” (although that has happened to some people), but because they couldn’t think of a “good” reason why they shouldn’t want to have sex. They loved their partner. They had birth control. They hadn’t experienced trauma. What was stopping them? Why didn’t they want it?

I think part of the problem is that there’s this idea that people’s natural state is wanting sex and wanting to consent to sex. […] You don’t need a reason to consent; ”you need a *reason* to opt out of sex rather than a reason to opt-in in the first place.“

This is a personal topic for me. I wouldn’t have consented to a lot of things in a previous relationship had I known that asexuality existed – had I known that asexuality is “a good, normal, and healthy way to be” – and there’s a lot of hurt in that for me. I was blamed and blamed myself for not being sexually attracted to my partner; after realizing that I’m asexual, I was able to stop blaming myself for not feeling sexual attraction. But then I became angry. I was angry at my ex for pushing sex. I was angry at the abysmal state of sex ed. I was angry at compulsory sexuality. And I was angry at myself. Why hadn’t I had the courage and confidence to say no?

I blamed my ex for a while – why did he push it when I said no so many times before? why did he enjoy it when I was clearly disinterested? – but that didn’t feel quite right. I said yes multiple times, and people can’t read minds. So then I was back to blaming myself. Perhaps if I truly felt so strongly that I didn’t want to have sex, I would have said no every time. But that doesn’t encapsulate the pressure and feeling of brokenness that I felt – the unspoken social norm that because I didn’t have a “good” reason to “deny” him, saying yes was a given. The problem is that I was left with no way to explain my hurt. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been a big deal: he said yes, I said yes, therefore everything was consensual. The problem is, had I known about asexuality, I would have said no. It felt like a wrong had occurred, even though there was no one to blame. And that is hermeneutical injustice.

Coined by Miranda Fricker in her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, hermeneutical injustice is "the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” twin_me’s introduction to epistemic justice explains it well:

Hermeneutical injustice is scary because of the word “hermeneutical.” What we need to know is that “hermeneutical” just means “having to do with interpreting things” – and in our case, “having to do with interpreting our experiences.” The foundational idea is fairly straightforward: having certain concepts helps us interpret our experiences. (Imagine trying to interpret the experience of anger or jealously or being “in the zone” without having a name or concept for it). But, how is this injustice? The answer to this question lies in the fact that a lot of experiences never become concepts that everyone learns. In fact, the concepts that everyone learns are often the concepts of people who are doing pretty well in society – not marginalized people. So, roughly, hermeneutical injustice happens when the reason that a relevant concept doesn’t become part of the collective consciousness is because the concept interprets an experience that is felt primarily by a marginalized group. Because [there] is no concept for the injustice the person is feeling, the person can't express, understand, or know it.

Fricker discusses a few case studies, the central case being the story of a woman, Wendy Sanford, who had severe depression after the birth of her first child. She blamed herself for her depression, and her husband blamed her as well. A friend convinced her to go to a workshop on women’s medical and sexual health, where one of the small groups she was in started talking about postpartum depression. Suddenly, she was able to make sense of her experience. Just knowing that she was experiencing a real phenomenon that other people experience changed her life. Even though many people experienced postpartum depression, it wasn’t talked about, and it wasn’t in the collective consciousness.

The parallel between Wendy’s revelation about postpartum depression and an asexual person’s revelation about asexuality is clear, particularly when the asexual person is in a relationship with a non-ace person. Fricker writes, “the primary harm of hermeneutical injustice consists in a situated hermeneutical inequality: the concrete situation is such that the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interests to be able to render intelligible.” In sexual situations, an asexual is left without hermeneutical resources to interpret their feelings. The collective hermeneutical lacuna around asexuality – or to go one step further, the lacuna around asexual feelings in general, i.e. lack of sexual attraction without a socially prescribed reason – harms the asexual person’s ability to consent. Learning about asexuality is therefore not only a hermeneutical breakthrough, but an overcoming of epistemic injustice.

Asexual invisibility is harmful in more ways than specific situations of sexual consent, too. Fricker asks, “Is hermeneutical injustice sometimes so damaging that it cramps the very development of self?” She gives an example using Edmund White's autobiographical novel, A Boy's Own Story. As he describes his love for a friend, the collective hermeneutical resources classifying homosexuality as a “sickness” or an “adolescent stage to pass through” conflicts with his own feelings. His sense of self is being formed by collective understandings of homosexuality, which are more powerful than his singular personal experiences. “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice, then, is to be understood not only in terms of the subject's being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction (constitutive and/or causal) of selfhood. In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.”

Similarly, an asexual’s sense of self is formed by collective understandings of sexuality, leading to feelings of brokenness, abnormality, and isolation. When the collective hermeneutical resources construct sexuality as default, there is no way develop a healthy asexual selfhood. Moreover, asexuals are socially constituted as sexual where, particularly in intimate and physical relationships, it is against their interests to be seen as such. We see the harm in this played out again in issues of consent. The collective understandings of sexuality are more powerful than the singular personal experiences of asexuals, and an asexual person doesn’t have the courage and confidence backed by hermeneutical resources to say that their feelings and experiences are valid and must be respected by their partner.

When you find yourself in a situation in which you seem to be the only one to feel the dissonance between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given experience, it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world. […] hermeneutical injustice not only brings secondary practical disadvantages, it also brings secondary epistemic disadvantages [… that] stem most basically from the subject's loss of epistemic confidence. The various ways in which loss of epistemic confidence might hinder one's epistemic career are, to reiterate, that it can cause literal loss of knowledge, that it may prevent one from gaining new knowledge, and more generally, that it is likely to stop one gaining certain important epistemic virtues, such as intellectual courage.

When I learned about asexuality, it was like the floodgates opened. Suddenly there was a term for my experiences and an entire community built around discussing them. Backed by this collective knowledge, I’m much more confident in my self, my boundaries, and my relationships. However, I was still left with pain and bitterness about my previous relationship; I didn’t have a model or framework in which to analyze a situation where lack of knowledge – for which no one was accountable – would’ve affected consent.

Now, we can talk about these consent situations as hermeneutical injustice. It encapsulates the visceral feeling that something wrong has occurred, yet no one involved in the situation is directly responsible. Fricker concludes, “hermeneutical injustice is not inflicted by any agent, but rather is caused by a feature of the collective hermeneutical resource – a one-off blind spot (in incidental cases), or (in systematic cases) a lacuna generated by a structural identity prejudice in the hermeneutical repertoire. Consequently, questions of culpability do not arise in the same way. None the less, they do arise, for the phenomenon should inspire us to ask what sorts of hearers we should try to be in a society in which there are likely to be speakers whose attempts to make communicative sense of their experiences are unjustly hindered.”

When people say that sexuality is a personal matter and no one should care what people do (or don’t do) in bed, it means that the collective hermeneutical lacuna around non-heterosexualities will never be filled. When people are confused on why some asexuals feel the need to “come out”, I can now explain hermeneutical injustice. As Anagnori concludes:

This is why asexual awareness is so important. We need everyone in the world to know that we exist, not only so that we can be respected, but so that millions of other asexual people can have the power to make informed, confident choices about their own sexuality. We need asexual people everywhere to know that they are not broken, abnormal or wrong for what they are feeling, and that they have the right to reject sex at any time, for any reason. When asexual people can confidently say “No,” then they will also be able to say “Yes” with more certainty and weight, and they will have the option of forming sexual relationships that respect their asexuality and bring them happiness.

In her article, Queenie goes on to state that the simple knowledge of the existence of asexuality might not be enough to counter compulsory sexuality, i.e. aces aren’t “suddenly free from pressure and expectations” after realizing they’re asexual. I completely agree. To analyze other consent situations, there’s Emily Nagoski’s model of consent (with addendums made by other people, as mentioned in the first paragraph of Queenie’s post). I’m also particularly fond of Lisa’s non-binary power model of consent. However, for the very specific case of an asexual person consenting to sex when either partner had no knowledge or understanding of asexuality, I believe that hermeneutical injustice is the best interpretation of the situation.

#asexuality #asexual #social justice #consent #hermeneutical injustice

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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What I Read Today(ish)

In work/life news, my coworker and I are presenting at the 2016 CSUN Conference next week on Responsive Accessibility in the New Google+, I made signs for different garbage types for the APIQWTC Year of the Monkey Lunar New Year Banquet, and I’m very, very tired due to daylight savings time.

How Gallaudet University’s Architects Are Redefining Deaf Space by Amanda Kolson Hurley “DeafSpace is an architectural approach that springs from the particular ways Deaf people perceive and inhabit space. […] DeafSpace isn’t about just replacing the auditory with the visual—it’s about creating a rich multi-sensory environment that eases mobility, expresses identity, and enhances wellbeing.”

The Matter of Black Lives by Jelani Cobb The history of #BlackLivesMatter, what the movement hopes to achieve, and its future.

8 Asian-American activists down with the cause by Angela Fichter “From South Asia to California, here are eight Asian Americans who helped change America for the better, and fought the power on their own terms.”

On the Racialization of Asexuality by Ianna Hawkins Owen “This chapter takes up a peripheral genealogy of the asexual through the study of race, beginning with the conceptual deployment of asexuality in the past to understand some of the ways in which the contemporary invocation of an asexual orientation is circumscribed by a racialized inheritance.”

#articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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Asexuality and Race in a Digital World

I’m hosting a workshop at EWOCC (Empowering Women of Color Conference) in Berkeley on April 9th. The theme this year is Decolonizing Feminism: Reclaiming our Bodies and Communities in a Digital World, and I thought that talking about the online ace community would fit right in.

I’m looking for fellow people of color who identify on the ace spectrum to talk with and understand how online ace communities have shaped their identity, along with how their racial identity interacts with their ace identity. If anyone has resources on the history of AVEN and discussions about race on AVEN, Tumblr, and other online platforms, that would be awesome, too! You can message me on Tumblr or send me an email at [email protected].

The workshop summary:

Asexuality, Race, and Community

Asexual communities exist largely online, constructed from shared experiences that center around a dissociation of sexuality. As a community born from the digital world, these online spaces are an interesting look into race and sexuality. As people of color, we have predefined sexual identities thrust upon us. Identifying on the asexual spectrum can often mean either conforming to or rejecting a stereotype – our race can't be removed from our (a)sexuality. However, experiences of intertwined identities have been marginalized and erased by the largely white ace community. Moving away from AVEN towards Tumblr and other blogging platforms, aces of color have formed pockets in which to discuss shared experiences. We'll discuss the evolution of the online ace community, the spaces that aces of color have been building, and asexuality and race in general. We'll also brainstorm ways to move forward in elevating the voices of aces of color.

I’m not sure how familiar the audience will be with asexuality, but I’m excited to see what comes out of the workshop and the conference as a whole.

#asexuality #asexual #aces of color #apoc #ace #qpoc

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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What I Read Today(ish)

I haven’t posted in a while due to volunteering more, spending hella time at the climbing gym, and general waffling. I’ve been reading a lot of interesting stuff lately, though, so I figured I would just start posting linkspams.

Some things I’ve been thinking about: race and (a)sexuality, anti-blackness in Asian communities, non-oppressive masculinity, and the absent referent in cultural appropriation.

Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability by Mia Mingus “This is our work as femmes of color: to take the notion of beauty (and most importantly the value placed upon it) and dismantle it (challenge it), not just in gender, but wherever it is being used to harm people, to exclude people, to shame people; as a justification for violence, colonization and genocide.”

We Need a Decolonized, Not a “Diverse”, Education by Zoé Samudzi “It is impossible for American education to be neutral and/or apolitical when lesson plans of all educational levels are sites of historical revisionism.”

Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh. by Adrienne K. J.K. Rowling has a series of writings up about the history of magic in North America in the Harry Potter world and it erases contemporary and living Native cultures.

Don’t Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say by Kj Dell’Antonia In a world where a child’s digital record can start the moment their parent posts a picture of them after birth, how can we teach and practice consent surrounding social media with children today?

Badass, Motherfucker, and Meat-Eater: Kit Yan’s Trans of Color Slammin’ Critique and the Archives of Possibilities by Bo Luengsuraswat “Yan’s performance brings to attention the impossibility for male-identified people, in general, and Asian American men, in particular, to simply reclaim maleness in order to be recognized as legitimate citizen-subjects, since there is no such a thing as a singular, authentic masculine ideal in which one can easily draw upon as a measure of identification and belonging.”

#articles

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starchythoughts · 9 years ago

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Surgery

The two year anniversary of my breast reduction just passed. It’s been one of the most important decisions I’ve made, not only because the quality of my life has improved by bounds, but because it was one of the first active, positive decisions that I made regarding my body.

Not many people know that I had the surgery, mostly because I was good at hiding under baggy clothes and bad posture. As soon as I got a full-time job and the health insurance that came with it kicked in, I started looking for a surgeon. I had spent most of my senior year in college trying to accept my body and find bras that fit well and looked okay; the years before that, I had resigned myself to ill-fitting bras. However, in the process of empowering myself by finding a bra that fit, I realized that I could get rid of the problem entirely. I was done spending time, energy, and money on something that I didn't think necessitated so much of my life.

Bras

Bras are not one-size-fits-all. They're complicated because breasts are complicated. Not only is there the usual band and cup size to think about, but the wire width, cup depth, and construction of the bra are some of the other considerations necessary to finding a well-fitting bra. It's not as simple as calculating your bra size and then buying any bra off-the-shelf; bra brands and models differ in sizing, and it takes multiple tries to find one that fits. Moreover, bras are expensive. Well-constructed bras are often $50+ each.

When I started on my bra-fitting journey, I was able to buy some used bras at a reduced price from /r/braswap (a reddit community for buying, selling, and exchanging bras) and Bratabase (similarly great community that also has a database of bra measurements and reviews). I ended up finding a couple of bras that fit me fairly well after an exhausting search spanning half a year, having tried at least a dozen different bra brands/styles/sizes, with multiple crying sessions when bras didn’t fit. It may seem absurd to cry over a bra, but I don’t know how to convey the frustration, anger, sadness, and hatred I felt toward my body when I had no bras that fit, no clothes that fit the way I wanted them to, and no way to exercise comfortably. Not only that, but the way I viewed myself clashed with my physical body and the way society viewed it.

Asian Identity

Being an Asian girl with large breasts is a really weird experience. I can’t even count the number of times I googled phrases such as “asian with large breasts” in an effort to find how other people deal with it, only to be met with images and links fetishizing Asian women. (How do you even google for such a thing?) The fetishization of feminine Asian bodies, especially those with larger breasts, distilled my body – my everyday body, the body I had to constantly live in – into a sex object. It felt terrible.

I finally found one blog, CurvyHK, with writings about the blogger’s personal experiences, bra reviews, and interesting resources and anecdotes on East Asian culture and breasts, such as a Korean documentary about Park Chaeri and her breast reduction. The documentary was exciting because it was the first time I had seen another Asian woman with my body type. However, I also struggled with the thought that getting a reduction would just be conceding to societal norms – being tired of feeling like an “other”, as Park Chaeri did. Conforming to the thin, small-chested Asian stereotype grants privilege (fitting into societal expectations and standard clothing sizes), and I wondered if it was the allure of that privilege that was pushing me to get the surgery.

Boob Problems

Breast reductions are interesting because they’re not a purely cosmetic surgery; the ramifications of carrying multiple pounds of flesh on your chest can be severe. I had minor neck and shoulder pain along with terrible, awful posture from trying to minimize how my chest looked. I had rashes due to constant skin contact and certain areas never having a chance to breathe. The only sports bra that allowed me to run comfortably was $70, or else I had to wear two or more bras when I exercised.

More often than not, though, the emotional toll was greater than the physical toll. Society tells us that our bodies are wrong when we don’t fit into certain clothes when the real reason is that the clothes themselves are wrong. I knew this intellectually, but it still hurt emotionally when the only button-up shirt that fit me had to be two sizes larger to accommodate my chest. Moreover, I was resentful that I had to spend so much time learning about bra sizing and fitting. I realized that all of the reasons – societally influenced or not – led me to overwhelming choose the surgery. I was certain that getting it would improve my life and how I viewed my body. Getting a reduction was a way for me to take back control of my body and my time.

Bodily Autonomy

My body is my own. My body is me. Unfortunately, we’re often told that our bodies are not ours by the media, by society, and even by the people whom we love. Bodies – especially feminine bodies – are commodified as objects to view, and even as objects to own.

My intimate partner at the time had a heteronormative view on bodies and relationships. He would say things like, “my body is yours”, with the implication that my body was therefore his. He opposed my choice of getting a breast reduction because he feared the resulting scars would make me less sexually attractive to him. While I was trying to take control over my body through the surgery, he was trying to convince me that his opinions on my body mattered more than my own. We had many arguments over the course of months, and he only conceded when I told him that my parents were supportive of my decision. Even after the surgery, he would prod me to use scar reducing cream. While I was ecstatic with my new breasts and new scars – and I had never thought I would ever be able to ecstatically look at my body – he shamed me because he thought scars were unattractive.

Throughout the course of my reduction process and into recovery, I gave advice to other women who were interested in getting reductions but had disapproving husbands or boyfriends. I told them about the many conversations I had, and how my boyfriend finally came around after realizing that 1) I wouldn’t rant about bras as much and 2) I would feel better about myself. Most of their partners also came around. What makes me angry is how I and these other women had to spend so much time convincing our partners to let us make a decision on our own bodies in the first place, needing to explain how the surgery would benefit them when the benefits for ourselves should’ve been enough. I loathe that people feel obliged to think about their sexual partners when modifying their bodies.

Asexuality

Breasts are viewed as sexual. As an asexual person, this was something that made me feel extremely uncomfortable in my own skin. Even touching my breasts made me tense because they were these weird, sexualized things that were somehow still a part of me. It certainly didn’t help that my partner was sexually attracted to them. I dreaded showering, putting on clothes, anything where I had to look at or touch them or remember that I had breasts.

When I had my reduction, I wasn’t aware of asexuality. When I look back, though, a lot of the emotional reasons why I hated my breasts were related to how alien the sexuality tied to them felt. Not only did I feel removed from the fetishization of my body due to them, I wanted them gone because I wanted to be less sexually attractive. My breasts didn’t hold any meaning to me and were a nuisance physically, as well as a way for people to perceive me as feminine and sexual. Now, they’ve taken on meaning for me through my scars.

Scars

I love my scars. Even when I don’t love my body for whatever reason, I still love my scars. They remind me that I’m ultimately in control of my body. They remind me of the time when I knew exactly what I wanted and made it happen. They remind me that I am capable.

If anyone is wondering what the process for going through a breast reduction is like – finding a good surgeon, getting it covered by insurance, the surgery and recovery process, etc. – please don't hesitate to ask me. I was a 28G and got reduced to a 28DD (the smallest I could go, with 2+ lbs removed).

For bra fitting, I highly recommend the ABTF Beginner's Guide – it goes through finding your bra size (your UK size, since US bra sizes aren't standardized) and includes recommendations for which bras might best fit your breast shape. There’s a great community at /r/abrathatfits with many knowledgeable and helpful people as well.

#misc #breast reduction #surgery #asian american #asexuality

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