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aboveallarescuer · 5 years ago

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How Dany assesses the counsel she receives and makes her own choices (& Character analysis) - Liberation of the Unsullied

This will be a series of posts meant to show that Dany is open to receiving advice and criticism, but that she doesn’t act solely based on what other people tell her to do. On the opposite, GRRM makes great effort to write a Dany who most often merges different viewpoints and/or finds her own solutions to the problems she’s facing. I won’t include every single decision she ever made (e.g. her decisions at court are often made without counsel and her execution of the ritual to hatch the dragon eggs was already exhaustively and deftly analyzed by other people), but there will be plenty of instances in this series that will prove my point nonetheless. The metas will always have four items: in which chapters the events mentioned take place; what advice she receives and from whom; what were her actions; the verdict (whether she followed other people’s advice, ignored/rejected them or did both at the same time).

Since this meta got very long, I'm putting the verdict above so that people who don't want to read the entire meta can at least find its synthesized points right away.

Chapter (s):

ASOS Daenerys I, II, III

The advice Dany receives:

Jorah advises Dany to turn to Astapor and buy the Unsullied so that she doesn't have to rely entirely on Illyrio. He recommends that she pretends to not know Valyrian. He later says that spilling blood will be inevitable in Westeros and that the Unsullied are known for not raping nor pillaging, so she'll cause less damage if she buys them. According to him, trying to be idealistic and noble gets you killed.

Barristan advises Dany to leave Astapor and hire mercenaries in the Free Cities or even expect the support of the Westerosi lords. He's firmly against trading a dragon for an army and tries to publicly intervene.

Verdict:

a) Intelligence and skills

Knowledge of Astapor, Old Ghis, the Free Cities and Essos in general

Dany retains the information Jorah gave her about Old Ghis's history to the point of articulating it in her own words and applying it to the harpy of Astapor (which she differentiates from the one from Old Ghis) to grasp its symbolic meaning.

Dany pays attention to the slave soldiers and identifies on her own where each came from, displaying her knowledge of the Free Cities and Essos in general.

Dany compares the treatment of the Unsullied to the Dothraki's treatment of their slaves, for she already knows a lot about the Dothraki's culture and organization at this point.

Dany notices that there are many other slaves in the city and that they also have varied traits and origins.

Dany pays special attention to the social hierarchy among the masters indicated in their tokars' fringes after Groleo tells her about it, which shows that she can memorize and apply information well.

Dany correctly guesses that the masters won't resist her offer of one dragon because she is aware that Old Ghis was defeated by the Valyrian Freehold five times precisely for that disadvantage.

Growing social awareness

In ASOS Daenerys I, Dany is unaware of the number of casualties and the level of dehumanization that come with the maintenance of slavery. At this point, she thought they were servants just like any others. Also, she didn't have the power and influence to be able to help others (or to think about the ways she could do so). Witnessing the training of the Unsullied will change her mind, similar to how she thought she was okay with the war's collateral damage until she saw the Lhazareen women being assaulted and tried to stop it.

Dany doesn't let Jhogo crack the whip in Astapor to announce her presence because she knows that it is used to subjugate slaves.

After seeing the cruel and horrific treatment of the Unsullied firsthand, Dany can no longer look at all the other slaves in the city and think that what's happening is okay. She observes how pervasive slavery is in Astapor twice.

Like with the whip, Dany already pays attention to the tokar and how symbolically tied it is to the masters.

Dany's growing awareness of all these social issues and her empathy for the slaves' plea stem from the fact that she lived their experiences too: she was also forced to leave her homeland and was later sold as a sex slave.

Dany's refusal to eat dog indicates her refusal to be complicit in the masters' oppression of the Unsullied.

Dany refuses to talk to Jorah about the Unsullied as if their treatment was not dehumanizing, so she tells him to not call them men to not become desensitized to the issue.

Emotional inteligence: restraint and assertiveness as a leader

Dany pretends she doesn't understand the number of insults that Kraznys is throwing at her and later asserts her heritage and titles as a response.

Dany hides her vulnerability and focuses on her political goals while talking to Barristan. She empathizes with Barristan later and reinforces her authority when she tells him that he's free to counsel her ... when they are alone. He is frank by telling her that he thinks she made a mistake by trading a dragon for an army, but Dany still shows self-assurance.

Dany reminds Jorah to call her by her title rather than her name.

Dany restrains her fear once more when she enters the gates of Astapor.

Asking for and gathering knowledge

Dany asks Kraznys if the Unsullied has officers and what is their gear.

Dany notices that Astapor lacks guards and questions why the Dothraki still haven't sacked the city.

Dany confirms with Missandei the reliability of the information Kraznys shared with her and makes more questions about the Unsullied.

Dany creates hypothetical situations in her questions to Kraznys and Missandei to conceal the possibility that she might apply the answers to fight the masters.

Actions during the negotiation for the Unsullied and the exchange

Dany gives everyone (her bloodriders, Jorah and Barristan) in her circle something to do while she meets with Kraznys.

Dany uses a Qartheen gown to negotiate with the slavers.

Dany brings her advisors and her khalasar with her during the negotiation in order to look more impressive (and, consequently, to seem able to pay for all of the Unsullied).

Dany already expected that she would have to offer her ships and one dragon.

Dany takes the necessary steps (based on what she heard from Kraznys and Missandei) to guarantee that the Unsullied will fight on her side and her leap of faith pays off.

Dany throws the whip aside and her draconic force is linked to freedom.

b) Character motivations and past experiences

Why she chose to go to Astapor

Dany wanted to make sure she wouldn't have to rely on other people (whose help is never certain, as she learned very well in Qarth).

She didn't think hiring mercenaries in the Free Cities was a good idea because she'd already seen how that failed for Viserys.

She is unsure of whether the Westerosi will rise to her.

As it's been already said, she thought that the Unsullied were treated as ordinary servants.

Empathy

Witnessing the training of the Unsullied radically changes Dany's initial plans.

Her growing awareness of all these social issues and her empathy for the slaves' plea stem from the fact that she lived their experiences too: she was also forced to leave her homeland and later sold as a sex slave.

Dany empathizes with Barristan and reminds him that he's free to counsel her ... when they are alone.

Dany refuses to talk to Jorah about the Unsullied as if their treatment was not dehumanizing, so she tells him to not call them men to not become desensitized to the issue.

Dany frees Missandei right after the latter is given as a gift (though she'll find out later that Missandei doesn't have a better option).

Dany's past experiences inform her reflections on what grounds should she be ruling and her later rebellion against the masters.

The negotiation scene shows that Dany had many, many options that she could have chosen and did not simply because she wanted to free all of the Unsullied:

If she just wanted an army, she could have offered all the trading goods in the ships and get the 1000 Unsullied that Jorah advised her to get.

If she just wanted an army, she wouldn't have offered to pay double for the untrained boys.

If she just wanted an army, she could have given the trading goods and the ships and left with 2000 Unsullied.

If she just wanted an army, she wouldn't have thought that she must have them all" and that "[i]t was [her] only choice" to offer them a dragon.

Hints that Dany plans on rebelling in ASOS Daenerys II

Dany betrays her uneasiness about what is happening several times (multiple passages below).

Dany makes a hypothetical question to Kraznys, seemingly in an attempt to find a way to offer freedom to the Unsullied.

Dany asks how many Unsullied the master has to sell (because she wants to rescue them all), not how large an army she wants.

Dany thinks she will take more than a hundred, if any at all.

When Barristan urges her to leave the city, Dany thinks she can't do so. She later tells Jorah the same thing.

Dany's steps to make her plan work in ASOS Daenerys III (and hints that she has the details worked out)

Dany already expected that she would have to offer her ships and one dragon during the negotiation.

Dany makes it clear to Groleo that the Unsullied are more important than ships (because of themselves, not their value as an army).

Dany probably shared her ideas with her bloodriders and Jorah.

Dany was using a Qartheen gown (represents inequality, flattery and falsehood) in the negotiation. In the exchange itself, she uses Dothraki clothing (represents war, equality and honesty).

Dany knows that there will be several deaths as a result of what she is doing.

Dany takes the necessary steps (based on what she heard from Kraznys and Missandei) to guarantee that the Unsullied will fight on her side and her leap of faith pays off.

Dany throws the whip aside and her draconic force is linked to freedom.

c) How Dany assessed the advice she received

Jorah

Jorah advises Dany to turn to Astapor and buy the Unsullied so that she doesn't have to rely entirely on Illyrio.

Dany takes his advice, but not before being thoughtful and making many questions and expressing many concerns: how will she buy them? Is it okay to "betray" Illyrio? What about the dangers on the march? What if Captain Groleo doesn't obey? She's not passively and blindly accepting things.

He recommends that she pretends to not know Valyrian.

Dany follows it with seemingly no reservations.

He later says that spilling blood will be inevitable in Westeros and that the Unsullied are known for not raping nor pillaging, so she'll cause less damage if she buys them.

At first, she slaps him for normalizing the Unsullied's training and talking about them as if they were objects to be sold. Later, she still tries to differentiate the attack against targeted combatants from the systematic attack against almost all of the city's population, save for the nobles.

According to him, trying to be idealistic and noble gets you killed.

More on that below.

Barristan

Barristan advises Dany to leave Astapor and hire mercenaries in the Free Cities or even expect the support of the Westerosi lords.

She thinks to herself that she can't leave the city now that she saw what she saw. To Barristan, she replies that the former option didn't work for her brother and that she can't rely on uncertainties.

Barristan is firmly against trading a dragon for an army and tries to publicly intervene.

Dany empathizes with him, but still reminds him that he's only supposed to question her privately and that she means to prove a few things of her own.

Overall

Neither Jorah nor Barristan can take credit for primarily motivating Dany's decision to free the slaves, though they certainly helped her in different ways.

Jorah thought it was okay for her to buy the Unsullied and be complicit in a process that dehumanizes them to the point that people can't even tell them apart or consider them men. As Dany said, "if he were her true knight", he wouldn't think that there was nothing wrong with that to begin with. Dany, on the other hand, refuses to be desensitized by it because she is a true queen.

Barristan empathized with the slaves' plea and doesn't want to be involved in slave trade, which is fair, but he doesn't think that there's anything he or Dany can do about it.

Like with Viserys and Drogo, Dany is influenced by both of their recommendations and apply them in different ways while forging her own path: she will not help to maintain the oppression of the slaves like Barristan advised her, but she won't play by the rules (because they view human beings as objects to be sold and invalidate her moral values, so they shouldn't be acknowledged as such to begin with) like Jorah advised her: she will break the rules because of her moral duty (as she sees it) to free the slaves.

Dany's actions:

In ASOS Daenerys I, Jorah is trying to have Dany distrust Barristan, Groleo and Illyrio. As usual, because of Dany's critical thinking skills, she filters his advice - she admits that it's strange that Barristan is "too old to be a squire, and too well spoken to be serving that oaf of an eunuch", but, at the same time, she laughs when he suggests that Barristan and Belwas are conspiring with the assassin to win her trust. The discussion becomes a bit more heated when Dany realizes that he's infantilizing her, but then he proposes a plan: change course to Astapor and buy Unsullied. At this point, 14-year-old Dany has not yet seen their inhuman training nor did she come to empathize deeply and viscerally with them nor does she have the power that allows her to think about how to help others:

Dany was not certain she liked the sound of that at all. Everything she’d ever heard of the flesh marts in the great slave cities of Yunkai, Meereen, and Astapor was dire and frightening. “What is there for me in Slaver’s Bay?” (ASOS Daenerys I)

She also doesn't understand how slavery is a systemic issue that affects different people on different levels and is still, nonetheless, inherently wrong:

“...In Astapor you can buy Unsullied.”

“The slaves in the spiked bronze hats?” Dany had seen Unsullied guards in the Free Cities, posted at the gates of magisters, archons, and dynasts. “Why should I want Unsullied? They don’t even ride horses, and most of them are fat.” (ASOS Daenerys I)

But how can this person make this sort of comment and then become an abolitionist figure by the end of the book? I want to contextualize that right away to avoid any confusion. ADWD Daenerys III will give us two reasons as to why Dany changed her mind (aside from her empathy and proactivity, of course):

As she will explain to Xaro, his slaves "seemed well treated and content" (which also explains why she didn't react negatively to Illyrio's either) and she changed her opinion witnessing "how Unsullied are made and trained". At this point, she thinks that slaves are treated like normal servants.

Also, she thinks to herself that she was only a beggar queen when she visited Qarth, so there wasn't much she could do. At this point, in the beginning of ASOS, her situation is still similar to the one from ACOK: Dany still has no considerable resources of her own and is being carried around by someone else's ships. It makes sense, then, that she thinks firstly about how to help herself before she considers that she might be able to help others.

It must also be said that the seeds for Dany's character development were planted way back in AGOT, when she thought she was okay with going to war until she realized she couldn't let the Lhazareen women be collateral damage of her actions. Here, she will think she's okay with buying the Unsullied until she goes to Astapor and realizes that no one deserves to be systematically tortured and brainwashed and sold the way they were.

Anyway, back to ASOS Daenerys I. Dany's response to Jorah's suggestion that she should buy Unsullied stems from ignorance - she thinks that the Unsullied are all too fat to ride horses because these are the only ones she saw in Pentos and Myr. To convince her that they are worth buying, Jorah tells her the Tale of the Three Thousand of Qohor, which is basically about a khal who had his khalasar utterly defeated by the Unsullied (bought as an afterthought by the Qohorik). After realizing their effectiveness, Qohor would only employ the Unsullied as city guards. Using that story to convince Dany was a very clever move from Jorah, who must've inferred from Dany's successful cultural assimilation and love for Drogo that she respects the Dothraki's strength (she does, but she's critical as well).

Dany admits that there is wisdom in what he's counseling, but she also notes that her crown is her only possession of value. Jorah responds that the Astapori may offer her gifts the way the Qartheen did or she can sell the trade goods that Illyrio's men took on. Dany is still reluctant because she says she considers Illyrio a friend to House Targaryen (though that's not how she assessed him before), but Jorah argues that a true friend will help her to buy "the beginnings of an army". Dany becomes more excited, but still considers the dangers on the march, and Jorah argues that there would be dangers at sea as well. Finally, Dany wonders if Groleo might refuse to change course; for Jorah, that is all the more reason to ask him to do so, for she will find out where his (and Arstan's and Belwas') true loyalty lies.

It's only then that Dany decides that she will command Groleo to set course for Astapor. The author took pains to make sure that Dany wouldn't just passively sit and listen to Jorah's advice and follow it. He has her making questions and gathering knowledge and forming her own conclusions. Just because hers matched with his (only for now) doesn't mean that she is not being an active player as well.

In ASOS Daenerys II, Dany arrives in Astapor. As we can see in this passage, she is able to retain Jorah's knowledge about its history, articulate it in her own words and apply it well enough to correctly identify the harpy of Ghis and grasp its symbolic meaning just by looking at its statue:

The harpy of Ghis, Dany thought. Old Ghis had fallen five thousand years ago, if she remembered true; its legions shattered by the might of young Valyria, its brick walls pulled down, its streets and buildings turned to ash and cinder by dragonflame, its very fields sown with salt, sulfur, and skulls. The gods of Ghis were dead, and so too its people; these Astapori were mongrels, Ser Jorah said. Even the Ghiscari tongue was largely forgotten; the slave cities spoke the High Valyrian of their conquerors, or what they had made of it.

Yet the symbol of the Old Empire still endured here, though this bronze monster had a heavy chain dangling from her talons, an open manacle at either end. The harpy of Ghis had a thunderbolt in her claws. This is the harpy of Astapor. (ASOS Daenerys II)

In Missandei's very first appearance, we find out how the Naathi are commonly perceived. Such a description seems to signal the author's thematic intents (namely, that war, rather than the peace, is the righteous path in this particular case) right away, as @rainhadaenerys already pointed out in this amazing meta:

The girl spoke the Common Tongue well, for one who had never been to Westeros. No older than ten, she had the round flat face, dusky skin, and golden eyes of Naath. The Peaceful People, her folk were called. All agreed that they made the best slaves. (ASOS Daenerys II)

While she negotiates with Kraznys, Dany follows a smart idea from Ser Jorah:

It had been Ser Jorah’s suggestion that she speak only Dothraki and the Common Tongue while in Astapor. My bear is more clever than he looks. (ASOS Daenerys II)

Some minor points: we get a very emasculating description of Kraznys to make sure his "looks" are as pitiful as his moral values, something that I've already criticized here. And Astapor is described as if it were Hell itself, though that's an aspect that's been discussed elsewhere and I won't belabor here.

Then, Dany gets to hear about the Unsullied's training. I'll give you a brief summary of its numerous cruelties, for they will, as I already showed above, dictate Dany's actions for the rest of this book and ADWD:

They don't have names because they're changed every dawn so they can remember that "they are vermin" and "more dogs than sheep".

They are castrated in order to have discipline, obedience, loyalty and fear and to no longer feel sexual desire.

They're chosen at five years old for "size and speed and strength" to be trained "from dawn to dusk" until they master the shortsword, the shield and the three spears.

As boys, on the day that they are cut, they are given puppies whom they are forced to strangle, otherwise they are killed and fed to the surviving dogs.

Only one boy in three survives the training.

To win their spiked caps, they are forced to "go to the slave marts with a silver mark, find some wailing newborn, and kill it before its mother's eyes".

They are forced to stand "for a day and a night, with no food nor water". It is said that, even after 99 of the 100 Unsullied collapse, the last one will stand until his death.

They won't move or defend themselves even after you lash their faces with a whip or cut their nipples off. That's because they drink the "wine of courage" regularly to feel less and less pain and endure any kind of torture.

And that's not even counting the numerous times Kraznys felt that he was entitled to lash Missandei. It's clear that GRRM strives to make Dany's future cause be as righteous as he can.

While Arstan and Kraznys are arguing with each other, Dany pays attention to the slave soldiers and identifies on her own where each comes from. It's a moment that displays both her knowledge and the fact that she's lived in Essos for her entire life:

Ignoring them all, Dany walked slowly down the line of slave soldiers. The girls followed close behind with the silk awning, to keep her in the shade, but the thousand men before her enjoyed no such protection. More than half had the copper skins and almond eyes of Dothraki and Lhazerene, but she saw men of the Free Cities in the ranks as well, along with pale Qartheen, ebon-faced Summer Islanders, and others whose origins she could not guess. And some had skins of the same amber hue as Kraznys mo Nakloz, and the bristly red-black hair that marked the ancient folk of Ghis, who named themselves the harpy’s sons. They sell even their own kind. It should not have surprised her. The Dothraki did the same, when khalasar met khalasar in the sea of grass.

Some of the soldiers were tall and some were short. They ranged in age from fourteen to twenty, she judged. Their cheeks were smooth, and their eyes all the same, be they black or brown or blue or grey or amber. (ASOS Daenerys II)

Dany often connects the warriors she meets or hears about with the Dothraki, about whom she has mixed feelings but was influenced nonetheless. In this chapter, her critical views of the Dothraki are brought to the fore. Not only she recalls that they sold "their own kind", she also tells Arstan that she herself was sold, which is a huge deal for a few reasons that I'll point out later.

Throughout her interactions with Kraznys, Dany betrays her uneasiness about what's happening several times:

It was hard to pretend not to understand. Dany laid a hand on Kraznys’s arm before he could raise the whip again. “Tell the Good Master that I see how strong his Unsullied are, and how bravely they suffer pain.”

Then he jabbed the swordpoint in beneath a wide pink nipple and began to work it back and forth.

“What is he doing?” Dany demanded of the girl, as the blood ran down the man’s chest.

“Tell the cow to stop her bleating,” said Kraznys, without waiting for the translation.

“They feel no pain, you see.”

“How can that be?” she demanded through the scribe.

“The wine of courage,” was the answer he gave her.

“No names?” Dany frowned at the little scribe. “Can that be what the Good Master said? They have no names?”

Her most visceral reaction comes when she finds out that infants are slain as part of the Unsullied's training, partly because that's too personal for her:

Dany’s mouth surely twisted at that. Did he see, or is he blind as well as cruel? She turned away quickly, trying to keep her face a mask until she heard the translation. Only then did she allow herself to say, “Whose infants do they slay?”

“To win his spiked cap, an Unsullied must go to the slave marts with a silver mark, find some wailing newborn, and kill it before its mother’s eyes. In this way, we make certain that there is no weakness left in them.”

She was feeling faint. The heat, she tried to tell herself. “You take a babe from its mother’s arms, kill it as she watches, and pay for her pain with a silver coin?”

Then we get an indication that she's already thinking of a plan to free the Unsullied at this very moment:

“The Good Master has said that these eunuchs cannot be tempted with coin or flesh,” Dany told the girl, “but if some enemy of mine should offer them freedom for betraying me ...”

“They would kill him out of hand and bring her his head, tell her that,” the slaver answered. “Other slaves may steal and hoard up silver in hopes of buying freedom, but an Unsullied would not take it if the little mare offered it as a gift. They have no life outside their duty. They are soldiers, and that is all.” (ASOS Daenerys II)

I also find it interesting that Dany doesn't ask how large an army she wants (though she admits she needs soldiers), but rather how many Unsullied he has to sell:

“It is soldiers I need,” Dany admitted.

“Tell her it is well she came to Astapor, then. Ask her how large an army she wishes to buy.”

“How many Unsullied do you have to sell?”

“Eight thousand fully trained and available at present.[”] (ASOS Daenerys II)

Which already hints at her desire to rescue them all (not her interest to buy an army), even she must go to extreme lengths to do so.

In any case, after she makes the question above, Dany asks if the Unsullied have officers and what is their gear. Then, Dany solicits Barristan's advice, who, obviously, says she shouldn't buy them. Dany tells him to elaborate on his answer because she wants Kraznys to hear his outrage:

“Why?” she asked. “Speak freely.” Dany thought she knew what he would say, but she wanted the slave girl to hear, so Kraznys mo Nakloz might hear later. (ASOS Daenerys II)

The squire explains that slavery is illegal in Westeros and that she will lose her public support and honor if she arrives with a slave army. Dany emphasizes that she must have an army to conquer Westeros, but Barristan believes that she'll have the support of half of the Westerosi because of Rhaegar (while mincing his words when he praises Aerys). Dany is not so sure, however:

“Those same high lords who abandoned my father to the Kingslayer and bent the knee to Robert the Usurper?”

“Even those who bent their knees may yearn in their hearts for the return of the dragons.”

“May,” said Dany. That was such a slippery word, may. In any language. (ASOS Daenerys II)

Another passage hints at her future actions for suggesting that she will either save the Unsullied or leave them behind if she can't be of help, for she won't take part in the slave trade:

Dany knew she would take more than a hundred, if she took any at all. (ASOS Daenerys II)

And she reminds Kraznys of her heritage and titles, which is more than warranted considering the numerous insults that he threw at her (while she had to feign ignorance, no less). He's not impressed and even accuses Dany of running to her man, which sounds like the author throwing shade at his sexist readers, especially since, despite other people's help, Dany will ultimately forge her own path.

Jhogo intends to crack his whip in the air to announce the Mother of Dragons's presence, but Dany, after witnessing how Kraznys uses the whip to subjugate others, tells him not to use it. This moment shows how, like with the tokar in ADWD, Dany understands the symbolic meaning of the whip (which is also why it's so significant that she uses it to punish Kraznys later):

But when he uncoiled the great silverhandled whip that Dany had given him, and made to crack it in the air, she leaned out and told him nay. “Not in this place, blood of my blood,” she said, in his own tongue. “These bricks have heard too much of the sound of whips.” (ASOS Daenerys II)

Astapor was once part of the Old Empire of Ghis and we see in this chapter that so much of its culture is informed by their pride of their former glory. However, nowadays, the description of the city shows that it's no longer a flourishing place (it is Hell, as I said above). Dany showcases her knowledge of the other cities she visited by associating Astapor with them:

An old city, this, she reflected, but not so populous as it was in its glory, nor near so crowded as Qarth or Pentos or Lys. (ASOS Daenerys II)

She pays attention to the fact that the Unsullied are not the only slaves in Astapor; they are everywhere in the city:

Her litter came to a sudden halt at the cross street, to allow a coffle of slaves to shuffle across her path, urged along by the crack of an overseer’s lash. These were no Unsullied, Dany noted, but a more common sort of men, with pale brown skins and black hair. There were women among them, but no children. All were naked. Two Astapori rode behind them on white asses, a man in a red silk tokar and a veiled woman in sheer blue linen decorated with flakes of lapis lazuli. In her red-black hair she wore an ivory comb. The man laughed as he whispered to her, paying no more mind to Dany than to his slaves, nor the overseer with his twisted five-thonged lash, a squat broad Dothraki who had the harpy and chains tattooed proudly across his muscular chest. (ASOS Daenerys II)

As we see above, Dany notices the slaves' varied traits and origins as they pass by fastened together and how slavery is so normalized that she is not the only one that the masters don't pay attention to, they don't pay any attention to their slaves either. Dany also picks up on the fact that the man is wearing a tokar (like Kraznys was), and I'm sure this will later inform her discomfort using it and her eventual (and righteous) rejection of it in ADWD.

Arstan murmurs an old rhyme and feels sympathy for the slaves and how the entire city is built upon their blood and suffering. However, he never advises Dany to do anything about it: he urges her to leave the city "before [her] heart turns to brick". Dany thinks something that also foreshadows her eventual rebellion:

“...Sail this very night, on the evening tide.”

Would that I could, thought Dany. (ASOS Daenerys II)

But she doesn't allow herself to share her anxieties and vulnerabilities with him because she's his liege, so she focuses on her political goals instead:

“When I leave Astapor it must be with an army, Ser Jorah says.”

Arstan counter-argues that Jorah was a slaver himself and that she could find an army in the Free Cities. That's not how it went for her (and Viserys), though. Even in Qarth, where people were awed by her dragons, it was still not reason enough to get their support:

“My brother visited Pentos, Myr, Braavos, near all the Free Cities. The magisters and archons fed him wine and promises, but his soul was starved to death. A man cannot sup from the beggar’s bowl all his life and stay a man. I had my taste in Qarth, that was enough. I will not come to Pentos bowl in hand.” (ASOS Daenerys II)

(On ADWD Daenerys III, she will also remember that Viserys tried to negotiate with the Golden Company and that they mocked him, which might or might not be foreshadowing for TWOW, in which she's likely to confront Aegon and the Golden Company.)

Arstan says that it's better to be a beggar than a slaver, which leads to the most powerful moment of the chapter and also one of my favorites of the entire series:

“There speaks one who has been neither.” Dany’s nostrils flared. “Do you know what it is like to be sold, squire? I do. My brother sold me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown. Well, Drogo crowned him in gold, though not as he had wished, and I ... my sun-and-stars made a queen of me, but if he had been a different man, it might have been much otherwise. Do you think I have forgotten how it felt to be afraid?” (ASOS Daenerys II)

I've seen people trying to argue that Barristan was the one who convinced Dany to rebel against the slavers, and this passage, to which @irrationalityi pointed in her wonderful meta, shows exactly that that's not the case: that was Dany's choice and only Dany's.

Barristan, despite feeling empathy for the slaves, never asked for Dany to do anything to help them. Instead, as I showed above, he had only focused on the political ramifications of being a slaveowner.

Barristan had lived his whole life in Westeros up until recently, Dany has lived her whole life in Essos. Barristan has a problem with slavery not only because it is wrong, but because it's not the Westerosi way (Dany is not entirely immune from that, but there's much more to it), similar to how Ned is judgemental of Varys partly because he doesn't follow the Northern way. Meanwhile, as I showed above, Dany pays attention to the slaves and is able to make guesses as to where they came from because her history was that of a refugee who was forced to run away from her homeland as well. Of course her empathy runs deep and of course her desire to do something about the injustice she's perceiving runs deep. No one needs to remind her of her own history.

As @irrationalityi aptly puts, "dany is saying that while ser barristan may have an abstract knowledge that slavery is wrong, and a culturally ingrained distaste for it, she has lived it. she’s not angry at him because he is implying she is doing something morally wrong; she is angry because he is acting as if she doesn’t already know that. she is telling ser barristan that she is not the person the op believes she would be were it not for ser barristan; she is considering purchasing the unsullied because she believes she must to achieve her political aims, but she understands well what slavery is and the consequences of the decision she is trying to make–that for her to own a slave army would be a stain, not on her honor, but on her conscience and her moral character".

Also, if Dany once thought that marrying the Lhazareen women to the Dothraki was a good option, now she's able to acknowledge the injustice of being sold and feeling afraid in general. She no longer thinks that giving the slaves to a better master is a viable alternative, she'll free them altogether.

Which brings me to the way Dany talks about Drogo here. It's very interesting, and I want to make speculations tied to her characterization so far.

In Dany's very first chapter, we find out two things: Dany knows a) that her brother is ineffective and short-sighted and b) that she is a slave in all but name. Even so, she couldn't say these things out loud. In fact, her feelings about Viserys in her thoughts did not match those in her spoken words and actions. Later, something similar would happen with Drogo: she would no longer acknowledge that she was his slave, but rather see him as "the shield that kept her safe". In both cases, Dany avoids to look back and see the full picture and be consistent about her beliefs and opinions because it would hurt too much to challenge her two main sources of emotional support.

However, this eventually changes with Viserys. In AGOT Daenerys III, Jorah admits to Dany how he feels about Viserys - to him, he's "the shadow of a snake". With his support (not that I think Jorah himself wanted to guide her, far from that), Dany says it out loud for the first time in her life that she doesn't think Viserys will ever take back the Seven Kingdoms, not even if he had the military strength to do so. However, because she loves him, she still tries to rationalize his actions and see the better in him in the next chapter. Her goodwill ends after he threatens to kill her son, and she's much more aware of who he was in ACOK and ASOS.

As for Drogo... In ACOK Daenerys III, Jorah, in a vicious attempt to isolate Dany from other men, reminds her that Illyrio sold her to Khal Drogo, which was something hard for her to confront and acknowledge because she was still grieving for him.

In ASOS Daenerys II, however, Dany is able to articulate to Barristan that yes, she was sold and she did feel afraid and she won't let anyone talk about it as if she didn't know these things. I wonder if Jorah (unwittingly) helped her to put things in perspective here as well like he did with Viserys.

Anyway, Barristan is quick to apologize for what he said and Dany forgives him:

“Only lies offend me, never honest counsel.” Dany patted Arstan’s spotted hand to reassure him. (ASOS Daenerys II)

Because Dany admires his "good face" and "great strength", she seeks his counsel, which is why she'd asked him to accompany her to meet Kraznys and see the Unsullied:

The old man had not wanted to sail to Astapor; nor did he favor buying this slave army. A queen should hear all sides before reaching a decision. That was why Dany had brought him with her to the Plaza of Pride, not to keep her safe. Her bloodriders would do that well enough. Ser Jorah Mormont she had left aboard Balerion to guard her people and her dragons. Much against her inclination, she had locked the dragons belowdecks. It was too dangerous to let them fly freely over the city; the world was all too full of men who would gladly kill them for no better reason than to name themselves dragonslayer. (ASOS Daenerys II)

As we see in this passage above, Dany naturally acts like a leader by thinking of which purposes each person might better serve her and organizing them accordingly. She also leaves her children belowdecks, which was most likely the best choice. As she will learn in ADWD, there really are men who take it on themselves to be dragonslayers or, as she'll put it, "heroes".

Dany returns to the ship and Strong Belwas offers her dog meat, which she refuses because "all she could think of was the Unsullied and their stupid puppies". As @thatprettymuslimgirl's post and my addition show, dogs are associated with slavery in ASOS and will later be connected to Hizdahr, the nobles in general and the false peace in ADWD. I'm not really sure if GRRM was thinking about all of this (though he did write big chunks of ADWD Daenerys IX shortly after he finished ASOS), but it's subtext that makes it clear, along with everything else I've already analyzed above, that Dany is rejecting the slavers' way of thinking right away. She might try to make peace with them later, but only because she was tired of war and carnage; her anti-slavery stance was always clear and consistent.

When Jorah finds her, he asks how many Unsullied the Astapori have for sale and Dany responds irritated:

“None.” Was it Mormont she was angry with, or this city with its sullen heat, its stinks and sweats and crumbling bricks? “They sell eunuchs, not men. Eunuchs made of brick, like the rest of Astapor. Shall I buy eight thousand brick eunuchs with dead eyes that never move, who kill suckling babes for the sake of a spiked hat and strangle their own dogs? They don’t even have names. So don’t call them men, ser.” (ASOS Daenerys II)

Here, Dany recognizes that no human being should ever have to undergo the sort of systematic abuse and torture that the Unsullied were forced to experience in order to become as subservient as they are. Dany recognizes how dehumanizing and unacceptable that sort of treatment was for making them "like one man" meant for sale (or "not men" at all) - that's why she tells Jorah to not call them men: she asks that he doesn't erase their suffering and talk as if the way they were treated was, in any way, acceptable.

Jorah doesn't understand any of this, though. While his advice for Dany to go to Astapor ultimately paid off because of Dany's actions, we should remind ourselves that he did her no favor. I've already shown in another post how he still has no problem with slavery even after being exiled, and you can see that in the next passage below: he can't understand why would Dany be angry at him for advising her to go to Astapor to buy them nor why would she be appalled by how they are treated, so he tries to normalize the situation by focusing on how effective as a force they can be ("the Unsullied are chosen as boys, and trained..."). That's enough for Dany, who rightfully slaps him in the face:

“Khaleesi,” he said, taken aback by her fury, “the Unsullied are chosen as boys, and trained—”

“I have heard all I care to of their training.” Dany could feel tears welling in her eyes, sudden and unwanted. Her hand flashed up and cracked Ser Jorah hard across the face. It was either that, or cry.

Mormont touched the cheek she’d slapped. “If I have displeased my queen—”

“You have. You’ve displeased me greatly, ser. If you were my true knight, you would never have brought me to this vile sty.” If you were my true knight, you would never have kissed me, or looked at my breasts the way you did, or ... (ASOS Daenerys II)

She makes it clear here: if he were her true knight, he wouldn't have brought her to Astapor. (And that he forced a kiss on her and looked at her breasts without her consent makes her anger even more pronounced, rightfully so.) Thankfully, Dany is a true queen, but not because of him.

(Also, Barristan explicitly called Jorah a slaver in this chapter, and I wonder if that also heightened her rage in the exchange above, for she's realizing that he does, indeed, talk like a slaver.)

Jorah says that he'll ask Groleo to send them somewhere else (which does not get to the root of the problem), but Dany stops him. Now that she saw what she saw, she can't remain passive about it, she feels it in her guts that she needs to do something:

“As Your Grace commands. I shall tell Captain Groleo to make ready to sail on the evening tide, for some sty less vile.”

“No,” said Dany. Groleo watched them from the forecastle, and his crew was watching too. Whitebeard, her bloodriders, Jhiqui, every one had stopped what they were doing at the sound of the slap. “I want to sail now, not on the tide, I want to sail far and fast and never look back. But I can’t, can I? There are eight thousand brick eunuchs for sale, and I must find some way to buy them.” And with that she left him, and went below. (ASOS Daenerys II)

In this moment, we see that Dany wishes she could do what Barristan told her to do: go west and pretend she didn't see what she saw (hence why it's so ludicrous to argue that he convinced her to free the slaves). But she "must find some way to buy them" now, not just the amount of soldiers she needs, but all the "eight thousand brick eunuchs for sale". As I said it before, she is already thinking about how she might free them.

Dany refuses to become desensitized by slavery, which she instinctively notices is pervasive throughout the entire city:

She stood by the rail and looked out over Astapor. From here it looks almost beautiful, she thought. The stars were coming out above, and the silk lanterns below, just as Kraznys’s translator had promised. The brick pyramids were all glimmery with light. But it is dark below, in the streets and plazas and fighting pits. And it is darkest of all in the barracks, where some little boy is feeding scraps to the puppy they gave him when they took away his manhood. (ASOS Daenerys II)

Interestingly, even here, Dany already seems opposed to the fighting pits.

Jorah shows up and tries to relativize the morality of the situation: if she will spill blood in Westeros, why not here in Slaver's Bay? Dany responds:

“The blood of my enemies I will shed gladly. The blood of innocents is another matter. Eight thousand Unsullied they would offer me. Eight thousand dead babes. Eight thousand strangled dogs.” (ASOS Daenerys II)

While there is something to be said about the parallels between the slavers and the feudal lords and about the collateral damage that Dany will inevitably inflict on the smallfolk when she fights for her birthright (for she seems ignorant of it in this moment), overall, she is correct: you can't compare the attack against targeted combatants with the systematic attack against almost all of the city's population, save for the nobles.

Jorah remembers the human impact of the Sack of King's Landing and points out that the Unsullied will cause less damage than a normal army would, so they'd be useful if she wants to defeat "the Usurper's dogs" and spare lives at the same time.

Then Dany will question why the city, which lacks protection, has not been invaded by khalasars yet:

Dany gazed off at the soft colored lights and let the cool salt breeze caress her. “You speak of sacking cities. Answer me this, ser—why have the Dothraki never sacked this city?” She pointed. “Look at the walls. You can see where they’ve begun to crumble. There, and there. Do you see any guards on those towers? I don’t. Are they hiding, ser? I saw these sons of the harpy today, all their proud highborn warriors. They dressed in linen skirts, and the fiercest thing about them was their hair. Even a modest khalasar could crack this Astapor like a nut and spill out the rotted meat inside. So tell me, why is that ugly harpy not sitting beside the godsway in Vaes Dothrak among the other stolen gods?” (ASOS Daenerys II)

I've showed some signs above that Dany is already thinking of how to free the slaves and, if she wants to do so, she needs to gather information about the city's defenses. She makes questions that get to the point of the matter, as Jorah responds that a) anyone who would want to attack Astapor would have to face the Unsullied, who are renowned ever since what happened at the gates of Qohor, b) Meereen, Yunkai, Lhazar and the eastern hinterlands have no reason to attack the city and c) the Dothraki provide slaves to the Astapori slavers. If the latter give gifts to the Dothraki in turn, the horselords will find it more convenient to ride on rather than fight. What other function their captives would have if there aren't slavers to sell them to, after all? Dany wishes her situation in Westeros could be resolved as easily as that of the Astapori and the Dothraki (by offering gifts and not fighting).

Dany recalls her brother Rhaegar, her main source of inspiration:

“Prince Rhaegar led free men into battle, not slaves. Whitebeard said he dubbed his squires himself, and made many other knights as well.”

“There was no higher honor than to receive your knighthood from the Prince of Dragonstone.”

“Tell me, then—when he touched a man on the shoulder with his sword, what did he say? ‘Go forth and kill the weak’? Or ‘Go forth and defend them’? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of who died beneath our dragon banners—did they give their lives because they believed in Rhaegar’s cause, or because they had been bought and paid for?” (ASOS Daenerys II)

Of course, Dany never knew who Rhaegar really was, so these statements are about her leadership style and her moral system rather than his.

Once again, Jorah maintains his position: trying to be idealistic gets you killed. Playing dirty makes you win. It's not so different from Cersei's "when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die".

Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably, Rhaegar died. (ASOS Daenerys II)

Jorah didn't really know who Rhaegar was, so I don't think this sentence is necessarily reliable. The spirit of his advice is simple, however: Jorah is trying to normalize the training of the Unsullied and the existence of slavery in general as necessary evils if Dany is to win the game of thrones.

On the other hand, these words were also useful in another sense: sometimes you can't play by the rules if you intend to succeed, especially not if these rules and conventions and institutions treat other people as interchangeable objects to be sold and invalidate your sense of morality. Barristan's advice was also helpful, not in the sense that she should leave the city, but rather that she should not be a part of the slave trade. And so, like with Viserys and Drogo, she will find a solution that was informed by both of these men's advice while also being her own: by refusing to view the slaves as objects to be traded, Dany considered the deal illegitimate and sparked an abolitionist campaign that would influence an entire continent. In other words, Dany did not play by the rules (like Jorah advised), but not by compromising her moral principles, but because of her moral principles (like Barristan advised).

I got ahead of myself her, but I felt that this was the most appropriate place to try to grasp to which extent these men influenced Dany and to which extent she acted on her own.

Now let's go to ASOS Daenerys III. At this point, Dany has already devised her plan to free the Unsullied. She tells the Good Masters that she intends to buy all of them. To appease them, she shows more skin:

She had chosen a Qartheen gown today. The deep violet silk brought out the purple of her eyes. The cut of it bared her left breast. While the Good Masters of Astapor conferred among themselves in low voices, Dany sipped tart persimmon wine from a tall silver flute. She could not quite make out all that they were saying, but she could hear the greed. (ASOS Daenerys III)

Also, in order to show that she is not just a beggar queen and is actually capable to buy all of the Unsullied, Dany brings her khalasar and advisors with her:

Each of the eight brokers was attended by two or three body slaves ... though one Grazdan, the eldest, had six. So as not to seem a beggar, Dany had brought her own attendants; Irri and Jhiqui in their sandsilk trousers and painted vests, old Whitebeard and mighty Belwas, her bloodriders. Ser Jorah stood behind her sweltering in his green surcoat with the black bear of Mormont embroidered upon it. (ASOS Daenerys III)

Groleo told Dany that the fringe on the tokar indicates the social hierarchy amongst the masters, so she pays special attention to each master's fringe's tokar:

In this cool green room atop the pyramid, two of the slavers wore tokars fringed in silver, five had gold fringes, and one, the oldest Grazdan, displayed a fringe of fat white pearls that clacked together softly when he shifted in his seat or moved an arm. (ASOS Daenerys III)

GRRM is trying hard to show that Dany is doing what she is doing for selfless reasons. They tell her that she might get all of the 8600 Unsullied if she has enough gold, but not the 2000 that haven't been properly trained, because they don't want to risk losing their credibility in case the latter fails in the field. But Dany insists:

“Tell the Good Masters that I will want even the little ones who still have their puppies. Tell them that I will pay as much for the boy they cut yesterday as for an Unsullied in a spiked helm.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

If Dany was really doing what she was doing just for the sake of an army, she wouldn't have made that offer. Still, they say no.

Dany frowned in annoyance. “Very well. Tell them I will pay double, so long as I get them all.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

She says she'll pay double to get all of them. One of the slavers remind her that she isn't Queen of Westeros yet, so she should be certain if she has enough gold and trading goods to pay for them all. Dany replies that they should know that better than her, for they've inspected her ships. The Good Master says she would normally have enough resources to pay for 1000 of them, but only 500 if she'll pay double. One of them says she could give them her crown and get 100 of them, but she says no for personal reasons:

“My crown is not for sale.” When Viserys sold their mother’s crown, the last joy had gone from him, leaving only rage. (ASOS Daenerys III)

If you'll recall, she does the same thing back in ACOK Daenerys III. What she does differently here, on the other hand, is to put one of her children in jeopardy. Back in that same chapter, Dany describes the dragons as "all the difference" for her to eventually become more than a beggar queen, so the weight of the risk she's about to take is heavy.

Besides her crown, Dany won't sell neither her people nor her people's goods and horses, but she can offer Illyrio's three ships to the slavers. Now, they say she can buy 2000 Unsullied.

Have in mind that this was Jorah's advice back in ASOS Daenerys I:

“That is what you will find in Astapor, Your Grace. Put ashore there, and continue on to Pentos overland. It will take longer, yes ... but when you break bread with Magister Illyrio, you will have a thousand swords behind you, not just four.” (ASOS Daenerys I)

Now look at the scene from ASOS Daenerys III that we're in:

The fat Grazdan turned to the others. They conferred in low voices once again. “Two of the thousands,” the one with the spiked beard said when he turned back. “It is too much, but the Good Masters are being generous and your need is being great.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

If all Dany wanted was to get an army, she could have stopped right here. She already had twice the number of Unsullied Jorah originally advised her to buy. In fact, she could've stopped earlier when she offered "every bead of amber and jar of saffron", because they were worth 1000 Unsullied, but she chose to pay double if this meant that the masters would change their mind and give her all of the slaves, both Unsullied and untrained boys.

But she doesn't want an army, she wants to free every single Unsullied. This is why the next moment is so meaningful:

Two thousand would never serve for what she meant to do. I must have them all. Dany knew what she must do now, though the taste of it was so bitter that even the persimmon wine could not cleanse it from her month. She had considered long and hard and found no other way. It is my only choice. “Give me all,” she said, “and you may have a dragon.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

That Dany "had considered long and hard and found no other way" reveals two things:

It reveals that Dany already expected that her resources and ships wouldn't be enough for the slavers to close the deal and give her all of the slaves, so she was prepared to offer one dragon, hard as it would be to risk a child.

It reveals that Dany is willing to go to any length to free the slaves. She "found no other way"? Of course she had! Again, she could have left the city and hired mercenaries in the Free Cities as Barristan advised her, she could have bought 1000 Unsullied as Jorah advised her, she could have bought the 2000 Unsullied. But Dany feels that it is her moral duty to free all of these men. That's why "[t]wo thousand would never serve for what she meant to do"; that's why she "must have them all"; that's why Dany thinks that "[i]t is my only choice", just like Brienne thinks "[n]o chance, and no choice".

Barristan tries to intervene and to persuade Dany to take another course of action (and there are still people crediting him for Dany's choices, sigh), but she is determined and asks for Jorah to remove him. She waits for their answer, but she already knows what it will be:

She knew the answer, though; she could see it in the glitter of their eyes and the smiles they tried so hard to hide. Astapor had thousands of eunuchs, and even more slave boys waiting to be cut, but there were only three living dragons in all the great wide world. And the Ghiscari lust for dragons. How could they not? Five times had Old Ghis contended with Valyria when the world was young, and five times gone down to bleak defeat. For the Freehold had dragons, and the Empire had none. (ASOS Daenerys III)

For all that Dany is criticized for her lack of Westerosi historical knowledge, we see in moments like this that she is able to retain whatever facts she learns from other people (we don't know if Jorah, Barristan, Viserys or Groleo told her) and apply them to better contextualize and grasp the problems she encounters. In this case, I also imagine that the Qartheen's reactions to her dragons factored into her conjecture.

And so, as Dany expected, the deal is made - all of the Unsullied and the untrained boys for her in exchange for all her goods (save for her crown and clothes), the three ships and Drogon, the largest dragon, for them. Missandei is given as a gift to Dany.

Dany empathizes with Barristan, even if he still disrespected her authority in public:

Arstan Whitebeard held his tongue as well, when Dany swept by him on the terrace. He followed her down the steps in silence, but she could hear his hardwood staff tap tapping on the red bricks as they went. She did not blame him for his fury. It was a wretched thing she did. The Mother of Dragons has sold her strongest child. Even the thought made her ill. (ASOS Daenerys III)

Like she did in the previous chapter, Dany makes it clear to Barristan that she wants his advice, but she reminds him of her position as well:

“Whitebeard,” she said, “I want your counsel, and you should never fear to speak your mind with me ... when we are alone. But never question me in front of strangers. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” he said unhappily. 

“I am not a child,” she told him. “I am a queen.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

Barristan is frank and says that even queens can make mistakes, for a dragon is worth more than any army, as Aegon proved in the Field of Fire. Dany shows self-assurance by responding:

“I know what Aegon proved. I mean to prove a few things of my own.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

Then, Dany talks to Missandei one-on-one for the first time. Missandei is surprised to find that Dany is actually fluent in High Valyrian. Dany frees Missandei and explains that she will serve as a handmaid, cross another continent and face wars with her if she chooses to stay, which she does because she doesn't have better options. Unfortunately, that's something Dany still hasn't learned, but the next chapter will have her start to understand that very lesson.

Then they start talking about the Unsullied. Dany knows that Kraznys may have lied to impress her, so she makes a few questions to confirm the reliability of the information he gave her:

“Are these Unsullied truly fearless?”

“...Is it true they feel no pain?”

“And they are obedient?”

Missandei confirms everything Kraznys had previously told Dany - they really are fearless, they really feel no pain, they really are obedient.

Dany makes new questions from now on. First, what will she do with them once her war is over? Missandei suggests keeping them as watchmen, reselling them or even asking them to kill themselves. Second:

“If I did resell them, how would I know they could not be used against me?” Dany asked pointedly. “Would they do that? Fight against me, even do me harm?”

“If their master commanded. They do not question, Your Grace. All the questions have been culled from them. They obey.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

In the previous chapter, as I showed (waaay) above, Dany had asked Kraznys what would happen if an enemy (herself) offered the Unsullied freedom for betraying their master. Kraznys replied that the enemy (herself) would be killed for it.

Now, in the moment from ASOS Dany III above, Dany words the question differently: if the Unsullied were sold from one person (masters) to another (Dany), would they fight against their former owner? Missandei answers that they would and echoes Kraznys's words by emphasizing that they do not question, they obey.

It's also worth pointing out that Dany never reveals to be asking these questions for her own sake. In fact, she creates hypothetical situations to conceal the possibility that she might apply that knowledge against the masters. So, by gathering these two pieces of information, Dany now knows what she needs to do in order to begin a successful rebellion: she needs to wait for the transaction to be made and to be acknowledged as their new owner. Only then it'll be possible for her to rebel and offer the Unsullied freedom.

Later, Groleo has another argument with Dany, who is vehement about getting the Unsullied (for the noble reasons I've already discussed above):

“Magister Illyrio is not here,” she finally had to tell him, “and if he was, he could not sway me either. I need the Unsullied more than I need these ships, and I will hear no more about it.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

Dany calls her bloodriders and Jorah to her cabin.

Afterward she called her bloodriders to her cabin, with Ser Jorah. They were the only ones she truly trusted.

She meant to sleep afterward, to be well rested for the morrow, but an hour of restless tossing in the stuffy confines of the cabin soon convinced her that was hopeless. Outside her door she found Aggo fitting a new string to his bow by the light of a swinging oil lamp. Rakharo sat crosslegged on the deck beside him, sharpening his arakh with a whetstone. (ASOS Daenerys III)

Considering that the author emphasizes that "they were the only ones she truly trusted", shows Aggo and Rakharo preparing their weapons for the next day (and they will begin to attack the masters before the Unsullied do) and has Jorah telling Dany that the next day will be a difficult one, I assume she shared her plan with them to make sure it would work out.

Then, she goes up in deck, Jorah finds her and they have a powerful exchange in which Dany reflects on why she calls herself queen in the first place:

“Khaleesi. You ought to be asleep. Tomorrow will be hot and hard, I promise you. You’ll need your strength.” 

“Do you remember Eroeh?” she asked him.

“The Lhazareen girl?”

“They were raping her, but I stopped them and took her under my protection. Only when my sun-and-stars was dead Mago took her back, used her again, and killed her. Aggo said it was her fate.”

“I remember,” Ser Jorah said.

“I was alone for a long time, Jorah. All alone but for my brother. I was such a small scared thing. Viserys should have protected me, but instead he hurt me and scared me worse. He shouldn’t have done that. He wasn’t just my brother, he was my king. Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves?”

“Some kings make themselves. Robert did.” 

“He was no true king,” Dany said scornfully. “He did no justice. Justice ... that’s what kings are for.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

These lines have already been analyzed in so many ways and quoted by so many people that I feel that I don't have anything new to add. I will quote @khaleesirin and myself to touch upon two particular aspects, however:

Dany’s storyline stands in contrast with the whole narrative surrounding the existence of The Others because when it comes to her, the realization we should be having is not that we need to gather / forge light (the heroes) to ready for a the fight against the real, ultimate darkness that’s about to come; Dany, as a hero and a revolutionary, came into view because in Arendtian terms, we have been, and are already in dark times. [...] There’s a reason why Dany’s character is so closely read as a revolutionary figure whose consciousness to fight for change, to end slavery, happens not because of her predetermined role, but because of the experiences she accumulated. (x)

Among her “contemporaries,” she’s the only one who actively sought for a universal sense of social justice, she’s the only one who actively appealed for the humanity of the repressed. (x)

The main takeaway is this: in terms of learning how to lead, Daenerys’ journey is not simply about how to be a ruler but on what grounds she should be ruling. (x)

What happened to Eroeh is not only something that fuels Dany’s anger and need for vengeance. It also fuels her desire to be just and fight for equality. This shows that negative feelings and sense of fairness can feed off each other (and let me be clear that the latter is a much stronger force on Daenerys). Dany had no agency once; she knows how that felt like. Now she, another rape victim to whom the narrative actually cares about giving a voice, will strive to give other people their agency because she can’t stand watching these injustices passively if she can do something about them. After what happened to me, this became so much more meaningful. She makes me feel like I can recover and succeed and be proactive too. (x)

Dany as a proactive hero is inspiring to me for the reasons expressed above:

She chose to fight for a cause that she had no any moral obligation to fight for nor any social ties to the group being oppressed (she transcended feudal loyalties before anyone else did) nor did she think she had a predetermined role to play. She did it all simply because her deep empathy and her own experiences as someone who's been oppressed before led to her development of a universal sense of social justice ("Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?")

Also, as any marginalized group can tell you in real life, we're always met with human opposition like her cause was (unlike the Others' threat, which necessarily involves everyone, but no social movement ever managed to do that). We're angry and traumatized and scared. Dany had all of these feelings too, but she sublimated them into an abolitionist campaign. She is both relatable and a power fantasy. The scene above encapsulates all the key reasons why Dany's character, leadership and overall development matter so much to so many readers.

It's also worth noting that the chapter links Dany's anti-slavery crusade with the War for the Dawn, even if Dany is unaware of that.

Morning finally arrives. Like she did many times before, Dany restrains her emotions here in order to be respected, to be able to act as a political leader and to carry out her plan effectively:

If I look back I am lost, Dany told herself the next morning as she entered Astapor through the harbor gates. She dared not remind herself how small and insignificant her following truly was, or she would lose all courage. (ASOS Daenerys III)

In Qarth, Dany wore their gowns as a way to appease them, but then ultimately chose her Dothraki vests in the docks as her way to rebel against them and leave the city. In this chapter, she does the same: the Qartheen gown was used to flatter the slavers, but her "horsehair pants and painted leather vests" are her preferred option, signaling her choice of war and "honesty" and equality:

Today she rode her silver, clad in horsehair pants and painted leather vest, a bronze medallion belt about her waist and two more crossed between her breasts. Irri and Jhiqui had braided her hair and hung it with a tiny silver bell whose chime sang of the Undying of Qarth, burned in their Palace of Dust. (ASOS Daenerys III)

I don't think it's a coincidence that, in ADWD, Dany wears a tokar (which bears similar functions to those of the Qartheen gown; both are associated with adulation and falsehood and are villainized partly for being feminine-coded) while trying to find common ground with the slavers and then meets with the Dothraki at the end of the book when she decides to reject the peace. Both ACOK and ASOS already had Dany using Dothraki clothing for the purpose of revolting against socially established practices. It's also fitting because Dany's experiences with the Dothraki inform both her sense of equality and her leadership style.

To hammer home the parallels between Dany's choices of outfits in ACOK and ASOS, GRRM mentions the "Undying of Qarth" and also compares the Astapori with the Qartheen:

They are not so different from Qartheen after all, she thought. They want a glimpse of dragons to tell their children of, and their children’s children. It made her wonder how many of them would ever have children. (ASOS Daenerys III)

This passage also highlights a few things: by now, Dany knows that people are awed by her dragons and will try to look at them or even possess them if they can. It also foreshadows that her actions, righteous as they might be, will inevitably result in violence, for she doesn't know which of them will come out alive to have children.

Unlike the day before, now Dany is bringing her entire retinue. She organizes them in a conscious attempt to make them look more imposing than they really are:

She put the oldest and weakest on the inside of the column, with the nursing women and those with child, and the little girls, and the boys too young to braid their hair. The rest—her warriors, such as they were—rode outside and moved their dismal herd along, the hundred-odd gaunt horses that had survived both red waste and black salt sea. (ASOS Daenerys III)

Karmically speaking, Dany's rebellion begins in the most appropriate spot. The Plaza of Punishment, which was where slaves once suffered for trying to fight for their dignity, is now where a successful anti-slavery rebellion against the masters takes place:

The Plaza of Pride with its great bronze harpy was too small to hold all the Unsullied she had bought. Instead they had been assembled in the Plaza of Punishment, fronting on Astapor’s main gate, so they might be marched directly from the city once Daenerys had taken them in hand. There were no bronze statues here; only a wooden platform where rebellious slaves were racked, and flayed, and hanged. “The Good Masters place them so they will be the first thing a new slave sees upon entering the city,” Missandei told her as they came to the plaza.

At first glimpse, Dany thought their skin was striped like the zorses of the Jogos Nhai. Then she rode her silver nearer and saw the raw red flesh beneath the crawling black stripes. Flies. Flies and maggots. The rebellious slaves had been peeled like a man might peel an apple, in a long curling strip. One man had an arm black with flies from fingers to elbow, and red and white beneath. Dany reined in beneath him. “What did this one do?”

“He raised a hand against his owner.” (ASOS Daenerys III)

All the trade goods are brought forward to be exchanged for the Unsullied and Kraznys makes another nasty advice on how best to use them. Finally, Dany hands the end of Drogon's chain to Kraznys, who gives her the whip in turn. With the knowledge she extracted from Missandei and Kraznys, Dany is aware that she needs to be acknowledged as the Unsullied's owner if she wants them to fight for her. She makes questions to guarantee that the deal is done and makes it plain to the Unsullied that they are now hers:

“Is it done, then? Do they belong to me?”

“It is done,” he agreed, giving the chain a sharp pull to bring Drogon down from the litter. (ASOS Daenerys III)

She stood in her stirrups and raised the harpy’s fingers above her head for all the Unsullied to see. “IT IS DONE!” she cried at the top of her lungs. “YOU ARE MINE!” She gave the mare her heels and galloped along the first rank, holding the fingers high. “YOU ARE THE DRAGON’S NOW! YOU’RE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR! IT IS DONE! IT IS DONE!” (ASOS Daenerys III)

She prepared the ground very well. Now she is ready to atack. The slavers are unable to control Drogon, and Dany explains why:

“He will not come,” Kraznys said.

“There is a reason. A dragon is no slave.” And Dany swept the lash down as hard as she could across the slaver’s face. Kraznys screamed and staggered back, the blood running red down his cheeks into his perfumed beard. The harpy’s fingers had torn his features half to pieces with one slash, but she did not pause to contemplate the ruin. “Drogon,” she sang out loudly, sweetly, all her fear forgotten. “Dracarys.”

The black dragon spread his wings and roared. (ASOS Daenerys III)

Chaos ensues, the other two dragons are unchained, the Good Masters can only shove one another aside in panic and the Astapori demon-horned warriors are swiftly defeated by Dany's khalasar. Old Grazdan, the Good Master with the highest level of authority, tries in vain to order the Unsullied to attack Dany. The Mother of Dragons's leap of faith pays off and the Unsullied side with her instead:

The Unsullied did not so much as look down to watch him die. Rank on rank on rank, they stood.

And did not move. The gods have heard my prayer.

“Unsullied!” Dany galloped before them, her silver-gold braid flying behind her, her bell chiming with every stride. “Slay the Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar or holds a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off every slave you see.” She raised the harpy’s fingers in the air ... and then she flung the scourge aside. “Freedom!” she sang out. “Dracarys! Dracarys!”

“Dracarys!” they shouted back, the sweetest word she’d ever heard. “Dracarys! Dracarys!” And all around them slavers ran and sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears and fire. (ASOS Daenerys III)

And the chapter ends triumphally. Dany is finally confident enough to throw the whip aside as the narrative links her draconic force to freedom.

#daenerys targaryen #asoiaf meta #dany and her choices #valyrianscrolls #a storm of swords

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floatingcatacombs · 5 years ago

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Why Tomoyo’s Mom is a Political Lesbian

12 Days of Aniblogging, Day 1

In my Cardcaptor Sakura gushpiece last year, I made an offhanded promise to write about why Tomoyo’s mom is a political lesbian once I finished my watchthrough. With all 70 episodes under my belt, it’s time to investigate what I was grasping at there.

I will never be over Sakura’s poncho in episode 2

We hear about Tomoyo’s mom as early as the second episode of the show. After Sakura and Tomoyo make plans to break into their school at night, Tomoyo arrives with a full security escort in a tinted vehicle, with an armored van full of costumes for Sakura right behind her. You see, her mother is the president of a very large toy company, which means that she’s ridiculously rich and able to assign bodyguards to her kid like it’s nothing. The two observations that instantly come to one’s mind are that a) all of the bodyguards are women, and b) they all have the gayest haircuts imaginable.

“And here are my conspicuously butch and femme bodyguards”

The rest of Tomoyo’s family situation really only shows up in Episode 10 and 11. We are properly introduced to her mom (Sonomi), and the chip on her shoulder. She’s out to spite Sakura’s father in increasingly lavish ways, and we learn that this stems from a long-standing grudge – Sakura’s dad married the girl that Sonomi was also helplessly in love with. So that’s the ‘lesbian’ box checked off of my argument.

That haircut..sure is asymmetric

But what about the ‘political’ part of ‘political lesbian’? I probably should have started with that rather than Cardcaptor wiki synopses. Political lesbianism is a combination of second-wave feminist ideals with the notion that sexuality is a choice. Rather than dumping a manifesto onto you, I’ll sum up the underlying philosophical argument at play here:

1. Sexual orientation is a choice, as is choosing to act on sexual orientation. 2. Heterosexuality is inherently patriarchal and oppressive. 3. Women have an obligation to avoid and fight patriarchy wherever they can.

___________

Conclusion 1: All women should avoid heterosexuality. Conclusion 2: All women who continue participating in heterosexuality are abandoning their obligations.

This is a seriously weighty argument. If we accept all three premises, we are left with the conclusion that not only is heterosexuality harmful to women, but women must abandon straight relationships, otherwise they are actively collaborating with the enemy.

What does the world even look like if one follows this argument to its conclusion? Most political lesbians also believe in lesbian separatism – the notion that women’s liberation cannot be achieved by collaborating with men. Women ought to give up marriage, families, and sex with men, otherwise they will never be able to overcome institutional sexism. As an alternative to sex with men, women could consider…sex with women! But whether they have sex with women or none at all isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things. What really matters is the political action of refusing heterosexuality.

political lesbian praxis

The Daidouji family’s living situation all but confirms Sonomi’s commitment to separatism. She lives in a modernist mansion where all of her maids, guards, and other servants are women. Most notably, she has no husband or male partner to be seen whatsoever. Sakura even makes the observation that Tomoyo never talks about her father. Other than whatever happened for Sonomi to have Tomoyo, she appears to have completely cut the concept of men and patriarchy out of her life. If her goal was to create a lesbian separatist dynasty, she appears to have succeeded (Tomoyo is, of course, a baby lesbian in the making).

Me gaining class consciousness

There is a certain allure to political lesbianism. The idea that men are the root of all suffering and cutting ties to men provides a fairy-tale escape for some women. For anyone who has ever felt threatened or imbalanced in heterosexual relationships, it offers an explanation on top of the way out. Of course, choosing to be a political lesbian still requires swallowing some pretty big pills. Should we try?

The most challenging premise at first is the idea that sexual orientation is a choice that can and should be changed on a whim. The social construction of sexuality is definitely not a mindset that has won out. In fact, the modern gay rights movements in the United States has specifically been spearheaded with the idea that gay people are “born this way”, a purely biological challenge to the idea that someone can just decide to like women once they hear about the evils of men. Indeed, the political lesbians of old were somewhat split on whether sexuality is socially constructed or a biological impulse. However, they can just take the middle ground and argue that it doesn’t really matter – lesbian relationships may or may not be able to provide an alternative to heterosexual relationships for historically straight women, but what really matters is the political act of refusing heterosexuality. If a woman cannot bring herself to love other woman, she can simply take a vow of celibacy or otherwise avoid men. This brings us straight to the second and third arguments – that heterosexuality itself is oppressive and must be actively resisted.

Sure, patriarchy and oppression are bad, but the routes chosen to argue against them are important. Although they believe in flexible and constructed sexuality, political lesbian’s arguments against heterosexuality are extremely biological. The seminal pamphlet “Love your Enemy?” argues that “there is a very special importance attached to sexuality under male supremacy when every sexual reference, every sexual joke, every sexual image serves to remind a woman of her invaded centre...” Penetration, specifically, carries strong symbolic significance in reinforcing the power of men on top of its physically invasive component. Even non-penetrative heterosexual sex still contains that roleplay of power and powerlessness to a political lesbian. There is no loophole that will allow women to keep loving men ethically – the demands of political lesbianism are Kantian maxims.

Sonomi loved Sakura’s mom to the point of viewing her pairing off with a man as a betrayal. It’s very easy to see it as an ideological betrayal on top of the personal one.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the third-wave notion that femaleness and maleness are not inherently tied to genitalia. After all, to the shock and chagrin of many a radical feminist, some women have penises. Is their sex inherently heteropatriarchal? What about men who don’t have penises? Do they have a get-out-of-jail-free card from this whole mess? What about nonbinary people, who have been completely ruled out of this conversation so far? In arguing a biological model of oppression, political lesbians will need to be able to answer for all of this.

Most of them respond by biting the bullet and doubling down on their original positions. They claim that trans women are just scheming men in dresses, that trans men are gender traitors who want to abandon their fellow women in pursuit of male privilege, and that nonbinary people are simply confused. It is through this reasoning that so many political lesbians grew up to be trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Many former members of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, such as Julie Bindel, have gradually pivoted from arguing for women’s rights on all fronts to single-mindedly becoming obsessed with making sure that trans people are forcibly excluded from all gendered spaces. Not only is it depressing to see so many radical feminists fall down this pathway, it’s terrifying to watch as TERFs gain more and more of a media foothold as they start to team up with their enemies, the religious right, over their shared hatred of transgender existence.

shut the fuck up, terf

It’s a depressing turn of events! Still, even knowing that the movement is rooted in transphobia, can political lesbianism be salvaged? The idea of women’s-only-spaces as a place for comfort, safety, and liberation still feels powerful and immediately understandable and implementable. Though the mainstream LGBT+ movement gained widespread acceptance through advocating that there was nothing they could do about their sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality is still a real thing for many women and spaces to help recognize that would be very useful. Of course, the definition of a woman is going to have to broaden to be trans-inclusive, and as recent efforts to amend the Gender Recognition Act in the UK have shown, this is very difficult in the current TERFy political climate. But I don’t think that every bit of political lesbian ideology needs to be shelved or trashed. As future waves of feminism start reigniting and reconciling various second-wave and third-wave conflicts, I’d estimate that political lesbianism is going to get a fair reevaluation amongst mainstream feminists sometime within the next decade, with the bad parts hopefully cut and the strong parts returned to public consciousness.

pretend kero-chan is giving this lecture ok

So where does this leave Tomoyo’s mom? uhhhhhhhhhhh

Tomoyo’s mom manages to achieve the lesbian separatist ideal of a life lived without men, but she only manages to do so by taking advantage of her vast wealth to set up her own miniature state of sorts. However, this totally goes against the radical feminist principles of grassroots organizing and class consciousness. In achieving the physical goals of political lesbianism, Sonomi has completely missed the symbolic goals of the ideology and is actually reinforcing heteropatriarchal power structures. With her vast concentrated wealth and vertical power hierarchy over her guards and maids, Sonomi is reproducing the very male supremacy power structures that radical feminists work to fight against. Though she may fancy herself a political lesbian, she probably would not be welcomed by any of them.

Also her hairstyle is still kind of bad. terf bangs, lol

#12daysofanime #12 days of anime #cardcaptor sakura #feminism #political lesbianism #sweet baby lesbian tomoyo and her ideologically compromised grownup lesbian mom

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archergabriella · 4 years ago

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the-feminist-philosopher · 2 years ago

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Oop. Look at that our current "separatism" actually is enforced by law, and has historically been enforced by law. In other countries with stricter "separatism," it's also enforced by law.

That why I said:

You say that separatism is about enforcing a material reality, but have you ever considered that our *current segregation* is because of a historical enforcement of a biologically nonexistent binary?

Just reinforcing exactly what they hope to accomplish is hardly radical, or feminist. The idea that you can just run off and create your own commune is actually a really privileged stance to take.

The Combahee River Collective statement, 1977:

...we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.

And don't be intentionally dense and reductive by comparing our current and historic sex segregation to that new women's-only gym that recently opened just a couple blocks away.

Feminist separatism risks defining itself by what it separates itself from, men. In a similar way that defining lesbianism as a "love of not men ('males')" rather than a love of women ironically centers the people the definition looks to exclude.

The separatism that is often advocated for goes beyond the creation of "women's colleges" and "women's gyms" and "women's teams," to the isolation of the person from any space that may include any "males" as well as any "females" who have not cut their ties from "males." This results in many "female people" withdrawing from the public sphere, which is admittedly still "male"-dominated, and the eschewing of necessary "female"-"female" alliances. This has the ironic consequence of reinforcing the female-private and male-public dichotomy. It also has the ironic consequence of reinforcing the female/male division and a sexual binary.

Some will even advocate for a withdrawal from mainstream activism- which, admittedly, has the most movement and support for reasons of being mainstream- ironically resulting not in a more "radical" form of activism, but in a stale activism with little momentum and far fewer supporters. Given that political involvement is a large part of the public-sphere, this can also have the ironic consequence of reinforcing the female-private and male-public dichotomy by not encouraging active and actually revolutionary political involvement.

This practice also ignores the wide range of oppressions that women face. This- plus the eschewing of necessary alliances to help dismantle an oppressive system- has been a major critique of Feminist Separatism by black feminists:

"to the extent that lesbians of color must struggle simultaneously against the racism of white women, separatism impedes the building of alliances with men of color... white women with class privilege don't share oppression with white men. They're in a critical and antagonistic position whereas Black women and other women of color definitely share oppressed situations with men of their race"

-Barbara Smith

Some may even assert that women should choose a sexuality that centers women only as political and feminist statement (as opposed to the more common mainstream position today that sexuality is not a choice), and that leads to biphobia and aphobia in some of these circles.

The "choice" feminist take has been to instead make gradual inroads into these public spaces where "female-people" have long been excluded under the guise of a "woman's choice." That was the wrong course of action.

In a truly epicinic society where gendered distinction between the sexes does not exist, such places as "men's only" (as well as "women's only) would not exist. I believe more in an active challenging of the existence of strict separatism in order to achieve epicinity. Do not ask politely for access to separate, "men-only" spaces. This space is not off-limits to you. Invade these spaces. Walk in and sit down where you belong. Force your way into settings previously occupied only by men.

We do not challenge hierarchies and binaries by either cutting ourselves off from public spaces or reinforcing this dynamic through the creation of more binary-based and influenced spaces. Instead, refuse to obey their demands. Use active measures of opposition. Purposefully reject the rules they have put forth that have historically and currently excluded us from certain places.

Make demands and do not budge.

You say that separatism is about enforcing a material reality, but have you ever considered that our current segregation is because of a historical enforcement of a biologically nonexistent binary? Have you considered that our current segregation has less to do with our actual differences and, rather, has something to do with perceived and socially-constructed differences?

Have you considered how segregation between "classes" of people increases violence against the marginalized and places roadblocks on upward mobility?

Have you considered the fact that "women's" and "men's" bathrooms exist not because we have different anatomy, but as an arbitrary way and reason to exclude women from public spaces?

Segregated bathrooms didn't exist until the 1700s and they only became wide-spread during the industrial revolution as more women entered the workplace. But society was reluctant to integrate women into the public sphere. So, they introduced separate facilities for literally everything. Separate train cars, separate bathrooms, separate reading rooms, separate everything. Women were not allowed to use the man's public sphere or spaces labeled "men's" because they were not considered full people or citizens worthy of equal access and equal space.

Segregation of peoples on the basis of a supposed fundamental biology has always led to a system that is separate and unequal between two classes of people.

There is a reason "women's" bathrooms still have yet to adequately serve us and why it was so fundamental women were integrated into historically male-only spaces.

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ccinthecity · 7 years ago

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LGBTQ+ History Tour | HUM4938 | Excursions

with Queer Tours of London

Following the steps of three activists from different phases of LGBTQ+ expression and community development, Stuart Feather, Dan Glass, and Lyndsay Burtonshaw, we explored a series of landmarks in central London significant to the Gay Liberation Front of the 1970’s, and received an intergenerational perspective of how these places and the queer community of London thereof, have changed.

2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the (partial) decriminalisation of Homosexuality and Abortion in the United Kingdom, through the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Despite a strong resurgence of fundamentalist christian values and relatively conservative ideas surrounding the two subjects, The Royal Courts of Justice granted assent to the law on July 27th, and it was passed. Although it was a much needed foundation for further activism, many of the rights that LGBTQ+ individuals hold today were still not supplied through this act—the age of consent was higher for homosexual relationships, and following legislation prevented the universal social acceptance of homosexual relationships and families, by restricting educational projects and materials and funds or resources that might be used for community learning.

This legislation, known as Section 28, passed in 1988 and rescinded in 2003, shaped the way queer people, especially queer youth, viewed themselves in respect to their community, by reinforcing the restrictive values that opposed the Sexual Offences act in the first place. A large part of queer identity (and identity in general), after all, is the accessibility of knowledge and understanding of those identities, populations and spaces (not only virtual but also physical) where those ideas can be exchanged. The fear associated with open expression as instilled by Section 28 catalysed the potential growth of queer spaces, and still today almost two decades after its acquittal, its effects are present, in the lack of disability, youth (see: Project Indigo), and permanently accessible centres.

Regardless, prior to any of these laws being passed, any sexually “deviant” behaviour remained illegal, and was entirely disparaged by British Society. Stopping by the ‘Notorious Urinal’ on Strand Street, a site which is now an sub-street cabaret club, underground gay culture was explored. Here, and in other urinals, bathrooms, (“tearooms” by the american standard) and public spaces of interaction, affection—cruising (not illegal) and cottaging (illegal) took place. To avoid being caught with their gay partners in the restroom, one individual might stand in a shopping bag behind the stall, to hide their feet. In movie theatres, like the Lyceum nearby, certain aisles were designated by Gay men, as those that could be used as places for meeting one another. A new subversive pseudo-language, really a cant-slang, Polari, emerged in the gay subculture in the earlier half of the twentieth century, mixing with other groups by the sixties (the drug subculture, to be frank), and influenced how Gay men in particular interacted. They could not be open, for fear of criminal prosecution, or hate crime.

The villainisation of homosexuality continued past the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, in quite seemingly innocent ways. Although the queer community had come out of the closet and into another world of what it meant to have a different proclaimed identity, their world was far from mainstream, and protested, at that. To make a stake of their own, two sociology students, Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter, founded the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, inviting queer men and women (and those in between) to end discrimination against the homosexual community in the workplace, education, medicine, and society (Feather, 30). The front soon faced various issues in its community. Less than a year after its founding in 1971, a book related to sexuality, entitled Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex…But Were Too Afraid To Ask by American Psychiatrist Dr. David Reuben, which completely ignored homosexual relationships except in mentioning the predatory, insatiable sexual nature of gay men and frivolity of Lesbianism (in that it was directly related to proclivity towards prostitution) rose to popular acclaim, becoming a best seller in the States. Upon the news that the book would be published through local company W H Allen, the Gay Liberation Front’s Counter-Psychiatry group petitioned against its release upon the grounds in a letter to the publisher that it was “pernicious and dangerous rubbish,” showing “obvious claims for those [the author] wishes to help.”. W H Allen proceeded with circulation, and more active protest took place. Demonstrations with street theatre groups were staged, book shop displays were trashed, and in the books that were left alone, pamphlets sat in between the pages, warning readers of misleading material (Feather, 130-133). The medical community still did not treat queer individuals as entirely healthy, or with the same concern as straight patients: as homosexuality was still seen as a mental illness, in some ways, healthcare was stigmatised, and limited (this stigmatisation most definitely contributed to less sex education, and led to the AIDS crisis of the 80’s and 90’s, the spread of STDs, and, today, a role of drug dependence and higher rates of mental illness in queer individuals). Standing in front of the brick townhouse formerly home to W H Allen Publishers, surrounded by the remaining promotional material for the PRIDE parade but a day earlier, it was hard to imagine that such blatant disrespect for the community would have taken place—but so is time and social change, that begins to erase our conceptualisation of possibility of behaviours from years prior, yet so is the reclamation and recovery of a society, that hides its shameful past.

Most of the places we visited had changed in the fifty years between the Sexual Offences Act and today—London is, after all, an amazing city, prone to change, growth, and the moving of shopfronts, landlords, and patrons. A negative to this effect, is the lack and closure of queer physical occupation, in part due to the immense growth of the business district and real estate sector, mostly due to gentrification. A quarter of LGBTQ+ spaces in London have closed in the past three years, and new spaces (especially those accessible to target groups mentioned prior) struggle to pop up and stay afloat (there are currently no Lesbian-only spaces in London). Thankfully, a few iconic sites still remain. Of those, we visited Heaven, a nightclub and bar in Charing Cross, that not only is a place to get together and party, but also to discuss community and safety (offering HIV/AIDS and STD testing, hosting community education events and speakers, and staying open for those who might feel more secure in their walls). Club culture is a large part of the LGBTQ+ culture, in full. Clubs are places of love, and acceptance, and celebration of one’s sexuality and identity attached. So many subcultures of the LGBTQ+ pop scene, including Drag (pageant and club especially), dance, and music (George Michael, anyone) emerged from the festivity, coming to full fruition in the space itself. Lyndsay mentioned the Bell, a nightclub from before her generation of activists that has since been closed, but housed a similar ambiance. Nowadays, the feeling of acceptance often can be accessed by interaction through the internet. Digital spaces for queer people, especially youth, are becoming all the more relevant and significant to the growth and activism of the community. Unfortunately, digital spaces cannot always make up for the benefits of physical spaces, but nonetheless, are essential to contemporary discussions of queer existence and occupation, and, due to advances in technology and social media, hold the potential to streamline and strengthen events in activism.

Pride in London, originally a protest in 1972, was depoliticised to a parade in 2004 (read more here in my post about 2017 PRIDE in London). But it was not the only event that was orchestrated to rally for the rights of LGBTQ+ folk by any means. In coming to Trafalgar Square, and later, situating ourselves on the fences of Whitehall (home of current Conservative party leader Theresa May, who has historically opposed queer rights), we were told the kinds of more ‘revolutionary’ if you will, forms of protest. Most involved the reclamation and re-appropriation of slurs or derogation—like mass kissing, or just a large gathering of Gay people in an area kissing one another where one couple may have been discouraged by a passerby, indicating the reclamation of that space not as one of intimidation, but security. To riot or protest is not to simply make noise, but to make express notice of your embodiment of a person, and those other people like you. We were told by Stuart about the GLF’s youth organised rally in Hyde Park in 1971consisting of ~1000 individuals, who went down Oxford Street and effectively began the roots of the pride parade, and ‘Operation Rupert’ an interruption of an evangelical christian conference, ‘The Festival of Light’ in early fall later that year, in which groups dressed as nuns and Klu Klux Klan members to caricature the attendees, released mice and stink bombs, and released banners intermittently throughout the initial ceremony, effectively disturbing the event and making a farce of the organisation, Dan’s remark of a 2015 march made on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall called “RIP Pride,”, an effective funeral to note and condemn the now pink-washed parade, and to honour the original radical roots of the protest.

At both the start and end points of the tour, Dan reminded us that “we cannot let activism be coopted,”. Needed words in a city, a society, with strong capitalist influences, new cultural appropriation of social justice, and a turbulent political near-future with the approach and execution of Brexit. Queer history and existence, as any minority record, is ingrained in the history of London, and the politics of the United Kingdom today. What the Gay Liberation Front stood for in 1970, in solidarity with the queer community and other races, so does the contemporary LGBTQ+ activist today, with added emphases on the rights of immigrants and refugees, and safety of queer individuals not just within the bounds of one’s city or country, but in the rest of the world.

Sources and Further Reading

A quick read about gay rights in the UK

The Polari Language

Queer Tours of London

Stuart Feather, Blowing the Lid: Gay Liberation, Sexual Revolution, and Radical Queens (find his book Here)

#activism #queer history #lgbtq history #excursions #hum4938 #queer tours of london #stuart feather #london #gay history

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neptunecreek · 5 years ago

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Speaking Freely: An Interview With Evan Greer

Evan Greer is many things: A musician, an activist for LGBTQ issues, the Deputy Director of Fight for the Future, and a true believer in the free and open internet. Evan is a longtime friend of EFF, and it was great to chat with her about the state of free expression, and what we should be doing to protect the internet for future activism.

Among the many topics we discussed was the tension that often arises between justice-oriented work and free expression activism, and how policies that promote censorship—no matter how well-intentioned—have historically benefited the powerful and harmed vulnerable or marginalized communities. This is something that we think about a lot in our work at EFF. Whether we’re talking about policies intended to curb online extremism or those meant to prevent sex trafficking, it’s important that we look at the potential collateral damage that will inevitably occur. In this interview, Evan talks about what we as free expression activists should do to get at that tension and find solutions that work for everyone in society.

We also talked about something near and dear to both of us: The power that the Internet still has to connect people across borders, and to allow disparate groups to mobilize. We’ll hear from Evan about what the Internet has meant for her music and activism, and what we need to do to protect it for those who come next.

Jillian C. York: What does free speech mean to you?

To me, it’s about the ability to challenge authority and power and establish norms. One of the things I always try to remind people now who are pushing for more regulation of speech, censorship, control over the flow of information is how rapidly norms can change and how recently in our history it was considered a norm for homosexuality to be criminalized or stigmatized.

For me it’s about recognizing that ideas currently seen as fringe or controversial may be seen as totally mainstream in even a matter of decades. And if we prevent people from saying those things out loud because we don’t like them right now or because we think they’re controversial then we’re actually freezing society as a whole to progress. And so I think, to me, it’s the most fundamental issue of tension between authoritarian structures and institutions that, almost universally, tend to trend toward the status quo. Institutions have, sort of built into their DNA, the [desire] to continue to exist. And to do that, the institution needs to maintain or replicate the conditions in which it rose to power, whether that institution is a government, a company, a religious group, or even a popular subculture. And so, to me, free speech or expression is about the ability to challenge those accepted norms and institutionally-enforced norms toward building a better society where we can build norms based in people’s human need rather than just based on momentum or status quo.

York: Absolutely. I think what you said about the fact that ideas currently seen as fringe may become mainstream...the reverse may be true as well. So what would you say right now to the more progressive people that aren’t so keen on this idea of free speech?

I think it’s super important to look through history. I think Cindy Cohn had an op-ed in Wired that summarized this in a way that I’ve been dancing around...I think that if you just look throughout history, even going back to the times of kings, it’s pretty easy to draw a correlation that censorship, largely, has always benefited those in power at the expense of those who do not have power. And even when [censorship has] been explicitly marketed as, or genuinely intended to benefit marginalized people and communities and voices, in the end, the net effect always seems to be that it reinforces the status quo and props up existing power structures. And if those power structures are broken or unjust, then more censorship—even if it’s intended to help the people being hurt by those power structures—largely ends up codifying those power structures and exacerbating discrimination and injustice, and takes away one of the most powerful tools we have to disrupt, or undermine, or overthrow those power structures.

I think it’s super important too for people to look at the edges. We’ve also made a lot of progress [recently]. Ideas that were fringe not that long ago are becoming mainstream, and the opposite is also true. And that leads folks, I think, to believe that fringe ideas are bad ideas. But it’s important to remember that, on a concrete level, anyone who’s done support for US-held political prisoners is acutely aware of the ways the US government can dictate things as simple as how, if you express support for an organization not based in the US, it can land you in prison. Or how payment processors have kicked off people who are doing political prisoner organizing, or organizing to support activists on the ground in Palestine, or in other places where the US government has an imperial interest in preventing money from flowing.

And so it’s easy to look around and not see mainstream or larger organizations that represent marginalized communities being hurt by these policies, but if you look to the fringes, there’s already this long, documented history of harm.

There’s also a logical fallacy here: The argument goes that these big centralized platforms are already doing a terrible job of moderating content; therefore they should moderate more. I just don’t understand that. I think we can and should push them to do better with the moderation practices that they have, and to be more transparent about them so we can hold them accountable and show where they’re falling short. But I don’t get jumping to “let’s do more of the thing they’re doing a bad job at” when we haven’t even fixed the fact that they’re doing a bad job of it, and I think most of us agree that we’re not sure they can ever do a good job of it.

York: You know that I agree with this. So let me take this in a bit of a different direction and ask: Whether there’s a rise in hate speech, or an amplification of it, if we don’t see content moderation as the solution or at least the only solution, what do you believe we should do to counter it?

I think this is the fundamental question and I think it’s super important that those of us who fiercely believe in defending free expression ask ourselves this question, because it’s not acceptable at this point to be like “yeah, white supremacy on the internet is a problem, but is it really that big of a problem?” That’s not okay. It’s really that big of a problem, and it needs to be fought and addressed.

I think your question of whether there’s more of it or it’s just being amplified is a valid question to ask, but in the end, the net effect is the same. This corrosive ideology that’s harmful to human society and leads to actual acts of violence needs to be fought at every turn. I’m kind of old school about it, I’m more about punching Nazis than I am about getting [corporations] to censor them.

I think we need the internet, and we need an open Internet, in order to mobilize and organize against the systems and structures and underlying ideologies that lead to all of this. I think it’s super important too that we zoom out and think about this in a pretty critical way. I think if you ask yourself “Which is doing more harm to society: The prison-industrial complex, or a few pretty loud white supremacists on the Internet?” [you’ll see that] the prison-industrial complex as whole—which is an authoritarian white supremacist structure built into our society and largely accepted—is just in terms of numbers committing far more atrocities than these high-profile assholes on the Internet, but we’re spending tremendous amounts of time and energy dealing with them.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be dealing with them but we should think about what we really want to do and how we want to organize. I think that if the solution that we come up with to deal with those assholes on the internet kneecaps our ability to eventually overthrow and dismantle the prison-industrial complex, are we actually creating a net benefit for society and for the people most affected by this structural oppression? How do we address the underlying income inequality and gross lack of basic human rights and dignity that a huge number of people in [the US] and around the world have that fuels so much of this online nonsense?

Call me a radical, but I like the look at problems at their roots. We’ve seen this with respect to [media policy] over time, like video games are the culprit for school shootings or encryption is making people do bad things. We’ve smacked down these arguments again and again, but here we are again. Do we want to spend all of our time and energy trying to deal with the speech itself, or addressing the underlying systems of oppression that are actually doing the harm and that can only be confronted with meaningful, deep grassroots organizing and community building, and by listening to the people who are being most affected, and to the people at the fringes whose voices are most likely to be silenced by any scheme that we come up with to deal with a relatively small number of destructive and dangerous assholes who are sort of ruining the party for everyone on the Internet.

York: It’s funny, that reminds me of my conversation with Asta Helgadottir, who spoke about how the amount of money that goes toward copyright enforcement is so much bigger than that which goes toward countering child sexual abuse imagery.

Yeah, I can see that. It’s also really important that we as free speech defenders can’t be the party of do-nothing. We can’t just be like “yeah it’s working fine the way it is, just leave it alone” because it’s not working fine the way it is. We as Fight for the Future and me personally have been kicking around different possibilities, policy solutions—but short of fixing the underlying problems, I don’t think that anything solves the problem of hate speech on the Internet. There were always be people who use the Internet to amplify what they’re doing, and the internet will always amplify the mainstream. You can be a Republican politician basically calling for policies that amount to genocide and you’re not going to get wrapped up in Facebook’s hate speech algorithm because you’re using all the right words. That’s just another example of how these policies ethically fail.

But beyond that, there are other things worth looking at. The structural thing, in terms of the internet itself, and speech, is centralization. And so finding policies that address the fact that there are now basically three websites that matter where you can speak and be heard, and these websites control those inordinate amount of speech and people’s ability to hear it...that’s what creates the problem that makes these questions—like “should we ban Alex Jones?”—hard to answer. If there were twenty platforms, that becomes a pretty easy question. But the weight of those decisions is so much greater when there are so few platforms or places where people can speak, and where having your own website doesn’t matter anymore when it can’t be shared on those three platforms.

That’s the underlying problem, and so we should look at policies that address that. Antitrust is interesting to look at, but I don’t think it’s a silver bullet that’s going to solve all of this. I think algorithmic transparency, or moderation transparency is another one—Facebook should make it easy for us, or for journalists, to really get a sense of what they’re taking down and how they’re making those decisions, so we can see the collateral damage that’s happening and hold them accountable to make sure they’re enforcing their existing policies fairly. It doesn’t involve taking down more speech, it means figuring out what they’re taking down now before we ask them to take down more.

And then another thing that I’ve been toying with, and I’m not totally sure about—it’s almost in the realm of Twitter banning political ads—is a temporary moratorium on algorithmic amplification entirely. There’s a huge difference between “anyone can say what they want” and “anyone can say what they want and Facebook is going to put its thumb on the scale and amplify certain types of speech that it knows will generate controversy and clicks and comments” and that basically creates an incentive to amplify some of the worst kinds of speech. Or on YouTube, where a kid starts watching a video about gaming, and then three videos later is being recommended white supremacist content. There’s a big difference between that and letting things go viral—like the internet used to be. I’m not going to pretend awful things don’t go viral, but it’s different from Facebook intentionally weighting the scales and pushing content that it knows is hateful but that makes it money.

I think that’s an interesting thing to look at: How much of the way we’re seeing the conversation being distorted right now is because of that amplification or because there’s an uptick in the number of assholes who believe in this ideology.

So I’m not sure about it, but the decisions we’re making about content moderation right now are arguably some of the most important decisions that humans are making right now, period, and they’re going to shape our civilization, so we need to make these decisions with that level of seriousness and thinking critically while we do it, and not just doing it on the news cycle or based on partisan winds or which way they’re blowing.

York: Absolutely—Okay, let me change directions and ask you my favorite question. Who’s your free speech hero?

I’d have to say Chelsea Manning. First of all, because she’s continuing to suffer at the hands of the US government for blowing the whistle and speaking out and fighting for what she believes in, but also because the conversations we’ve had over the years while she was incarcerated were so instrumental in me shaping my thoughts on this. She’s such a critical thinker and someone who’s directly experienced the ways in which government crackdowns on expression can go so horribly wrong. And so she has a very smart analysis on this. I really value our friendship and the ways she thinks about these issues and has acted on them.

York: I think that’s a great answer, and you’re not the only one who’s named her. She’s a hero for so many of us. Okay, so the one other thing I want to ask is to pull in the fact that you’re a musician and ask: Is there anything from that background that has inspired your work?

There’s two angles there that are really interesting. Just in general, my life as an independent musician in the early days of the Internet shaped why I care about this, and why I think it’s so crucial to defend a free and open internet.

And for me as a trans, independent artist who never had a record label and was writing songs about overthrowing capitalism and being queer, I was never going to find mainstream success in a world where the gatekeepers of the musical community were executives and mostly white male writers for Rolling Stone (although even that has shifted over the past decades).

So me and some of my compatriots were some of the first artists to put our music online for free download. We were putting our music on Archive.org before Napster was a thing. I instantly saw the huge potential of it. I’d show up at a show in Prague where I don’t speak the language and there are like, 200 punk kids who know all the words of my songs. I’d never been there or sold a CD in that area, but the Internet existed, and people were able to find this music they connected with and share it, and instantly, it felt like this is the most powerful force I’d ever seen for lifting up the voices that are so often left out of the conversation in our society, and I’ve never lost sight of that. More and more we see the downsides of it too, the ways in which it can be used to silence people and amplify existing forces of oppression but...I still believe in the Internet, and I still believe that it’s a net positive force for society, and that the fights we have over policy that surround it are so essential because of that revolutionary and transformative power that it still holds, even with all of the downsides.

But also, having kind of an understanding of the ways that people are used as pawns in policy. For example, I’m a member of BMI, I get their emails, and they’re constantly preying on the fears of artists and on our self-esteem and feelings of being screwed over by an unscrupulous industry and using that to convince people that copyright maximalist policies are awesome and what is needed to protect individual artists and creators when you and I both know that’s not true and in fact those policies largely line the pockets of executives and tech companies that are now the new gatekeepers of the music industry.

To me, that’s informed the way I think about all of these issues. I’m acutely aware of how policies that claim to do one thing can easily be used to do something much more nefarious. I think with copyright, that’s just such a clear example where none of these policies would have benefited me as an independent artist. That understanding has shaped the way I think about these things more broadly and always makes me question them, even when something is well-intentioned. There are just always ways they can backfire, and when they do, it hurts the weakest at the benefit of the most powerful.

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archiveofprolbems · 7 years ago

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Another World - Michelle Kuo talks with David Grabber

David Graeber talks with the Editor-in-Chief of Artforum about philosophy, totalities, insurrectionism, baseline communism, and his book Debt.

MICHELLE KUO: Many artists and critics have been reading your work on everything from the long history of debt, to anarchism, to culture as “creative refusal.” That interest seems to be a reflection of how the art world, at this moment, sees itself in parallel to politics and economics. Why does the art world want to call on economic theories of immaterial labor, for instance, or strategies of resistance tied to such theories and worldviews? We love to import terms from outside our discipline and, frankly, our comprehension. The misprision can often be productive, but it can also be very frustrating.

DAVID GRAEBER: Yes, it’s similar to the relation between anthropology and philosophy—as seen by anyone who actually knows anything about philosophy.

MK: In a report on a conference of social theorists at Tate Britain [“The Sadness of Post-Workerism” (2008)], you debunked the term immaterial labor convincingly. You argued that it’s confined to a very small view of history because it caricatures what came before, let’s say, 1965 or 1945 in order to argue that everything is completely different now.

DG: Immaterial labor is a very reductive concept. It’s also a very deceptive one: It combines the postmodern language of utter rupture, the idea that the world is completely new due to some grandiose break in history, in order to disguise a genuinely antiquated, 1930s version of Marxism where everything can be categorized as either infrastructure or superstructure. After all, what’s “immaterial” here? Not the labor. The product. So that one form of labor that produces something I consider material is fundamentally different from another form of labor that produces something I consider immaterial. But the greatest strength of Marxist theory, in my view, is that it destroys that distinction. Art is just another form of production and, like all creative processes, necessarily is material and involves thought and ideas.

MK: So in a way, we’re paradoxically reinforcing old binaries.

DG: Exactly, yes.

MK: What’s interesting, too, is the entire notion of rupture. As historians or cultural critics, we’re always taught that rupture is good and continuity is bad. It’s still a reaction against [Leopold von] Ranke’s narrative version of history. In other words, continuity is seen as a reactionary way of looking at history. But you’re obviously interested in posing a more sweeping, long-range history or theory of history. Why did you choose to do so?

DG: As an activist it strikes me that some of the most radical, most revolutionary movements today base themselves in indigenous communities, which are communities that see themselves as traditionalists but think of tradition itself as a potentially radical thing. So the deeper the roots you have, the more challenging things you can do with them.

MK: But that’s modernism, too, in a way—T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

DG: Well, to a large degree, what we call postmodernism is modernist. What we call poststructuralism is structuralism. It’s because you have that static notion of structure that you have to have rupture.

MK: Which also still largely determines contemporary sociology and its foundation, however buried, in structural functionalism. In the art world, we still seem heavily indebted to [Fredric] Jameson looking at the long-range economic theories of [Ernest] Mandel and their relation to cultural shifts.

DG: Which is, again, infrastructure and superstructure . . . What’s so fascinating to me is that Jameson first proposes that postmodernism is going to be the cultural superstructure of this new technological infrastructure that Mandel is predicting, which we forget now. It was going to be based on robot factories and new forms of energy, and the machines would be doing all the work—human work was supposed to disappear. This is what everybody was anticipating in the late ’60s. Working-class politics will disappear when there are no more workers, and we’re going to have to think of something else on which to base inequality. And Jameson was describing the timeless, superficial culture that’s going to emerge when we have flying cars and nanorobots produce everything.

You could just imagine things, and they would appear. Of course, those technologies never did appear. Instead, industrialists produced a similar effect by outsourcing the factories—but that was the timeless, superficial illusion. Your sneakers look more high-tech today but were created using even more low-tech processes than before. So in Jameson there is this fascinating play of infrastructure and superstructure; the play of images becomes a way of disguising the fact that the infrastructure has barely changed at all.

MK: In general, theories of labor and culture tend to revert to periodization, to impose a deterministic relationship between economic shifts and cultural ones. What do you think of the impetus to find moments of social revolution, for example, and then correlates in the cultural sphere?

DG: Well, I’m guilty of that myself, on occasion. Take the notion of flameout. When I first proposed it, I was drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s notion that at least since 1789, all real revolutions have been world revolutions and that the most significant thing they accomplished was to change political common sense, which is what I like to think is also happening right now. Wallerstein himself is already talking about the world revolution of 2011.

It happens twice—it happens in the artistic field with the explosion of Dada right around the world revolution of 1917, and then it happens in the ’70s in Continental philosophy, in the wake of what Wallerstein calls the world revolution of 1968. In each case you have a moment where a particular grand tradition, whether the artistic or the intellectual avant-garde, in a matter of just a few years runs through almost every logical permutation of every radical gesture you could possibly make within the terms of that tradition. And then suddenly everybody says, “Oh no, what do we do now?”

As a political radical myself, coming of age intellectually in the wake of such a moment, there was a profound sense of frustration that it was as if we’d reverted to this almost classical notion of a dream time, where there’s nothing for us to do but to repeat the same founding gestures over and over again. We can return to this kind of creation in an imaginary way, but the time of creation itself is forever lost.

MK: That’s reminiscent of artists who became involved in Occupy Wall Street, for example—talking to some of them, it was clear that they were searching for something. And in a way it seemed like a quintessentially modernist search for an antidote to alienation.

DG: The idea that alienation is a bad thing is a modernist problem. Most philosophical movements—and, by extension, social movements—actually embrace alienation. You’re trying to achieve a state of alienation. That’s the ideal if you’re a Buddhist or an early Christian, for example; alienation is a sign that you understand something about the reality of the world.

So perhaps what’s new with modernity is that people feel they shouldn’t be alienated. Colin Campbell wrote a book called The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism [1987], in which he argued that modernity has introduced a genuinely new form of hedonism. Hedonism is no longer just getting the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll or whatever but it’s become a matter of selling new fantasies so that you’re always imagining the thing you want. The object of desire is just an excuse, a pretext, and that’s why you’re always disappointed when you get it.

Campbell’s argument makes total sense when you first read it. But in fact, again, it’s backward. If you look at history—at, say, medieval theories of desire—it’s utterly assumed that what you desire is—

MK: God.

DG: Or courtly love, yes. But whatever it ultimately is, the idea that by seizing the object of your desire you would resolve the issue was actually considered a symptom of melancholia. The fantasies themselves are the realization of desire. So by that logic, what Campbell describes is not a new idea. What’s actually new is the notion that you should be able to resolve desire by attaining the object. Perhaps what’s new is the fact that we think there’s something wrong with alienation, not that we experience it. By most medieval perspectives, our entire civilization is thus really a form of clinical depression. [laughter]

MK: I’m not sure all medievalists would agree with you, but the parallel is interesting: It goes back to this caricature of a totalizing system. We live under what we assume is a totalizing system of capital today, and yet the medieval church was a hegemony that was in fact far more totalizing.

DG: Indeed.

MK: Nevertheless, tremendous cultural activity and thought occurred within those parameters. So for us the question becomes, In what ways can we operate under hegemony and still conceive of other possible worlds—worlds that, you’ve argued, are already present?

DG: That’s one of the things I try to drive home in all my work—that the very notion that we exist in a totalizing system is itself the core ideological idea we need to overcome. Because that idea makes us willfully blind to at least half of our own activity, which could just as easily be described as being communistic or anarchistic. These are the other worlds already present in our daily life. But we don’t acknowledge them. We don’t call acts of sharing, or the state-supported industries all around us, communist, even though key aspects of them clearly are.

MK: What’s interesting for the practice of art is that, of course, the very notion of critique is premised to a certain degree on a totalizing system. There has to be something to disrupt, combat, reroute. How do you understand critique more specifically?

DG: I think about this all the time. I mean, I am suspicious of [Bruno] Latour’s volley in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” [2004], which essentially said—I’m paraphrasing—“Let us critique the idea of critique. We must contest what’s become of relativism with a renewed type of empiricism.”

MK: Right, although it also was a valuable intervention to have made.

DG: Yes—if you apply the logic of critique too consistently, you create this almost gnostic notion of reality, that the one thing we can do is to be the person who realizes the world is wrong.

It may be incredibly rewarding intellectually, but it’s also a terrible trap. I always go back to Marx’s famous phrase from 1843, “Toward a Ruthless Critique of Everything That Exists.” It was something he wrote when he was twenty-five, which is appropriate for that age. When I was younger, I felt that way, too. Now I feel that such ruthlessness has its price.

But it strikes me that radical theory has always been caught between that moment and the Marxian moment in which you try to understand the rule, all the hidden structures of power and the way in which every institution that might seem innocuous contributes to reproducing some larger totality, which is one of domination and oppression. And so, if you take it too seriously, critique rather loses its point because it becomes impossible to imagine anything outside. That’s when you end up needing, relying on, the logic of total rupture. Something will happen, I don’t know, a really big riot, and then during the effervescence a new world will just come into being. There are insurrectionists who say that outright.

In the anarchist movement, in fact, there was a movement back and forth between the emphasis on rupture and its opposite. During the global-justice movement, the big word was prefiguration—the notion of building the institutions of a new society in the shell of old. Then came the frustration after 9/11. A lot of people turned back to insurrectionism, which was posed as this radical new theory. Of course it was really going back to one model of anarchism from the 1890s, which incorporated the Marxist logic of fundamental rupture. They combined it with French theory from the 1970s and thought they had something new. It’s a moment of despair.

MK: An exquisite corpse.

DG: Yes, and because of that model, they can’t understand that communism has always been present, which is what I would argue, that it’s the basis of any social relations, any ontological ground of sociality. Instead they see it as something new in the same way that they’ve suddenly discovered immaterial labor—

MK: Or biopolitics, as you’ve pointed out.

DG: Indeed, biopolitics is nothing new. The notion that the health and prosperity of the population are bound up in sovereignty is actually the founding notion of sovereignty.

MK: The question then becomes, What do these everyday moments of communism mean for a theory of the individual? How do they relate to individuality?

DG: I developed that relation in the Debt book, and it’s been somewhat misunderstood. One of the ideas I was trying to pursue was how one comes up with something like the value of the individual without having to frame it within the rather mystical notion that you have a unique crystalline core, which is the basis of your value, irrespective of social relations. Because it struck me, if you look at matters like compensation for wrongful death and the ways traditional societies resolve feuds, there is very clearly an assumption of the unique value of the individual. But the uniqueness is predicated on the fact that the individual is a unique nexus of social relations.

And I think that’s what we’ve lost—the notion that we’re sedimented beings created by endless configurations of relations with others. I think individuality is something we constantly create through relations with others, and that, in a way, this very fact resolves [Émile] Durkheim’s favorite problem, which is: How do I reward society for having allowed me to become an individual? Durkheim had this idea that we are all burdened by an infinite social debt, which he inherited from Auguste Comte—the idea that you owe society for allowing you to be an individual, that individuality is a kind of cosmic debt to society or to nature. I wanted to deconstruct the entire notion that one’s existence can be conceived as anything like debt. Since, after all, a debt is a relation of jural equality. It’s premised on the notion that there is a contractual relation between two equal parties. But how can the individual and society conceivably be posed as equal partners to a business deal? It’s absurd.

So I wanted to move instead to a notion of the individual as a nexus of relations. But in order to do that you have to reimagine a lot of things, including, I suspect, our very notions of mind. A lot of the things we think of as the ultimate products of individuality are in fact products of relationships, of dyadic or triadic relations of one kind or another.

MK: It’s one way out of the structure-versus-agency problem.

DG: Precisely, yes.

MK: And yet the legacy of critique within the art world seems to be all about structure and not about agency. It’s as if there is no agency. And so many critics and artists arrive at this impasse because they’re essentially stuck in those two categories.

DG: As is all social theory. Even though sociologists deny it.

MK: Even the most sophisticated Bourdevin perspectives.

Beyond the question of the individual, the other dimension in question is time. Do you think that anthropology and art can still help each other in some way to get a better picture of the longue durée?

DG: Definitely. That was one of the points of my book. I first was putting it together in a piece for Mute in the immediate wake of 2008, and I began by saying that when you’re in a crisis, the first thing you have to do is to ask, What is the larger rhythmic or temporal structure in which these events are taking place?

So I decided to cast my net as widely as possible, to say, What if this is part of a genuinely world-historic breaking point, the sort of thing that only happens every five hundred years or so—my idea of a long oscillation between periods of credit—and, surprisingly, it worked. That’s one reason I ended up writing the book. It might all seem contradictory, since I am arguing against the notion of rupture, but I also insist that this breaking point can only be understood by looking at continuities in the longest possible durée.

MK: In the same way, perhaps one can only look at shifts in culture right now in terms of a much broader time line. But those shifts, however we conceive of them, can’t really be reduced to waves or cycles, just as, I think, virtually no contemporary economist takes Kondratieff waves seriously, or other comparable long-wave theories of the world economy. Yet no one seems to be posing an alternative.

DG: I think there is a reason for that, which is that it has become the almost obsessive priority of contemporary capitalism to make sure that no one is. Over the course of twelve years of activism, I’ve come to realize that whoever is running this system is obsessed with winning the conceptual war—much more so, in fact, than with actual economic viability. Given the choice between an option that makes capitalism seem like the only possible system and an option that actually makes capitalism a more viable long-term system, they always choose the former.

Oddly enough, I first picked up on this in an activist context. It was 2002, and we went to the IMF meetings [in Washington]. And we were scared, because it was right after 9/11. Sure enough, they overwhelmed us with police and endless security. Considering our numbers, it was shocking that they would devote all of these resources to containing us. And we all went home feeling pretty depressed. It was only later that I learned how profoundly we’d disrupted things. The IMF actually held some of their meetings via teleconference because of the security risk we ostensibly posed. All the parties were canceled. Basically, the police shut down the meetings for us. I realized that the fact that three hundred anarchists go home depressed seems much more important to them than whether the IMF meetings actually happened. That was a revelation. As the whole thing falls apart in front of us, the one battle they’ve won is over the imagination.

MK: But how do you view attempts within or on behalf of art to engage in this “battle over the imagination”?

DG: Actually, when I was thinking about what I would say about the relation between the art world and Occupy Wall Street, I was struck by a remarkable pattern. I started thinking of all the conversations about the art world I’ve had in the process of Occupy Wall Street, which was surprising to me because I don’t know that much about the art world. I thought, Who are the people who really led me to the events of August? I was based in England the year before, and the group I was involved with was Arts Against Cuts. And the person I worked with most closely was Sophie Carapetian, a sculptor. Then when I got here to New York, the person who brought me to 16 Beaver Street, where I found out about the Occupy Wall Street planning, was another artist, Colleen Asper. And there I met the artist Georgia Sagri, with whom I was intensely involved within the formation of the General Assembly. And then the first person I got involved, who ended up playing a critical role, was Marisa Holmes, who used to be a performance artist and is now a filmmaker. What do all these people have in common? They’re all young women artists, every one of them.

And almost all of them had experienced exactly that tension between individual authorship and participation in larger activist projects. Another artist I know, for example, made a sculpture of a giant carrot used during a protest at Millbank; I think it was actually thrown through the window of Tory headquarters and set on fire. She feels it was her best work, but her collective, which is mostly women, insisted on collective authorship, and she feels unable to attach her name to the work. And it just brings home the tension a lot of women artists, in particular, feel, that they’re much more likely to be involved in these collective projects. On the one hand, such collectives aim to transcend egoism, but to what degree are they just reproducing the same structural suppression women artists regularly experience, because here too a woman is not allowed to claim authorship of her best work?

How do you resolve the dilemma? Yes, it is the collective that makes you an individual, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t become an individual. It’s a really interesting question. But I thought I would throw it out there because I don’t know the answer either.

MK: That leads us to the model of consensus, which is interesting to me because I participated in consensus in a very dilettantish way, in college. And I’ve always wondered whether or not consensus actually promotes or risks a lapse into stasis rather than engendering action or even active thought.

DG: Consensus is a default mode to me. There is a consensus process with a particular form that has emerged through feminism, anarchism, different social movements. But what I always emphasize is that if you can’t force people to do things they don’t want to do, you’re starting with consensus one way or another. The techniques you reach to get to consensus are secondary.

So when people talk about anarchist forms of organization and have assumed that either we are anti-organizational or we’re only for very limited forms of collective, I always say, “Well, no.” Anarchism believes in any form of organization that would not require the existence of armed guys whom you could call up if things really went wrong. That could include all sorts of social forms. And on the most basic level, that’s all consensus really means.

MK: It helps to explain why the history of anarchism within the visual arts encompasses some very unlikely suspects from very different milieus, like Seurat, Signac, Fénéon, Barnett Newman, John Cage, who were all distinct from histories of dissensus or of antagonism.

DG: It’s not my area, but I could read up on it. [laughter]

MK: It seems that some of the artists who were involved in Occupy were looking for the possibilities that consensus posed with respect to ways of relating socially or ways of forging social bonds that were different.

DG: Precisely.

MK: But just as at any other moment in time that we’ve discussed, artists may dip into this kind of sphere in order to feel personally invigorated or emotionally validated in some way and then go back to their daily lives. Nothing really changes.

DG: And I still have publishers. I think it’s all about the creation of firewalls between vertical organizations and horizontal organizations, individual celebrity and collective decision making; it’s all about how to create membranes between different but simultaneous worlds.

MK: That sounds suspiciously like capitalist schizophrenia.

DG: Yeah, I realized I was moving in a certain direction there. But it’s significant that Guattari came up with the notion of the machine when he was trying to think of a nonvanguardist form of political organization. And while I’m skeptical of what people have done with that legacy, Guattari’s original formulation remains important.

MK: But to think of alternate worlds or, to a lesser extent, many of the propositions concerning culture and the political—it’s all still a version of defamiliarization, in a way.

DG: It’s still formalist.

MK: Maybe at its best.

DG: Not even that good. OK.

MK: Which is to say that the Russian Formalists came up with a theory of revolution—that a revolution in perception would instigate a revolution in society—that’s as potent as any to follow. But whether you want to introduce frisson or cogs in the machine, or you want to slow things down or create friction or divert the flows of capital or redistribute the sensible, these all seem like ways of talking about defamiliarization, a kind of revelatory practice of changing one’s perspective or sensation, or undoing the programmed gaze, or pulling back the curtain and demystifying some larger scheme.

I think we’ve turned to these notions as a way of seeking to articulate the kinds of political power art might actually wield—it has to do with debates in the art world now that evince very conflicted feelings about whether or not our discourse ascribes completely fantastical powers to a work of art, saying that a work somehow contests neoliberalism because of X, Y, and Z or whatever. And the sinking feeling that altering perception or sensation or flows of information is merely to repeat what already happens in consumer economies. But as we grapple with these questions, I wonder if we are condemned to rehearse this very old problem, and whether we need to think of another approach.

DG: It takes you back to the notion of critique. It relates to the Marxian notion in which you have the ruthless critique of everything that exists, where everything can be seen from the perspective of its role in reproducing some larger system of alienation or inequality or hierarchy, whatever it may be.

Then you can also argue that every human possibility is simultaneously present. [Marcel] Mauss thought communism and individualism were two sides of the same coin. But democracy, monarchy, markets—everything is always present. So in that case it’s not so much a question of characterizing a system as of looking at which forms of relations are currently dominant and which ones have managed to present themselves as innate, given, the essence of human nature.

This is what I find most useful. If you take that as a starting point, what critique is is not revealing the totality of the system. There is no overall totality. If there’s an ideological illusion, it’s the very idea that there could be—that we live in “capitalism,” for instance, a total system that pervades everything, rather than one dominated by capital. But at the same time, I think it’s deeply utopian to imagine a world of utter plurality without any conceptual totalities at all. What we need is one thousand totalities, just as we need one thousand utopias. There is nothing wrong with a utopia unless you have just one.

MK: But economics itself is incorporating that now. Contemporary economics has absorbed the nonrational actor into its models.

DG: But all economic actors are irrational—they have to be, because they have no reason to want what they want. Take the very notion of self-interest, which I describe in the book. Why are we using the word interest? The word comes directly from the idea of interest payments. It’s the transformation of what Saint Augustine called self-love, and they decided to make it a little less theological so they called it interest. Interest is that which endlessly accrues and grows, so that Augustinian notion of the infinite passions and desires is still there—but in a financialized, rationalized form.

Rationality is always the tool of something. Anarchism, for me, moves beyond mere rationality to something else. I call it reasonableness. And reasonableness is a much more complicated notion than rationality, but includes it. Reasonableness for me is the ability to make compromises between formally incommensurable values, which is exactly that which escapes classic models of rationality. And it’s what most of what life is actually about.

Source: https://libcom.org/library/another-world-michelle-kuo-talks-david-graeber

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viewing-identity-closets · 7 years ago

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Intersectionality and Queerness

While the previous studies and scholars discussed queer and its relationship to identity categories based on sexual orientation and gender, Glick makes an important point. Glick says, “Queer cannot be discussed in terms of sexuality or gender alone, because it is not through sex and gender alone that we live our complex lives" (Glick, 2003, p. 128). Agreeing with Glick, Cohen adds, “It is my argument, as I stated earlier, that one of the great failings of queer theory and specifically queer politics has been their inability to incorporate into analysis of the world and strategies for political mobilization the roles that race, class, and gender play in defining people’s differing relations to dominant and normalizing power” (Cohen, 2005 , p. 260). Johnson thus seeks to provide a solution for a lack intersectionality in some canonical queer theories saying, “Quare, on the other hand, not only speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well. “Quare” offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized class knowledges” (Johnson, 2005, p. 127).

Moreover, Puar and Quiroga recognize the ways in which Queer theories operate in different contexts and can engage with the advocation U.S. nation state/imperialism. Quiroga states, “Let me put a different way: Queer studies was a project born and bred in the Republic, but it soon became linked to a broad imperial project that sought to impose norms, statues, and identities on other regions of the world” (Quiroga, 2003, p. 134).

Puar then addresses part of Quiroga’s argument through the term homonationalism. “I am deploying the term homo-nationalism to mark arrangements of US sexual exceptionalism— homonormativity—that complicates the dichotomous implications of casting the nation as only supportive and productive of heteronormativity and always repressive and disallowing of homosexuality. I argue that the Orientalist invocation of the ‘terrorist’ is one discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves: homo-nationalism. For contemporary forms of US nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay and queer bodies is crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects” (Puar, 2006, p. 68).

“Furthermore, there is nothing inherently or intrinsically anti-nation or anti-nationalist about queerness either, despite a critical distancing from gay and lesbian identities. Through the disaggregating registers of race, kinship, and consumption, queerness is also under duress to naturalize itself in relation to citizenship, patriotism, and nationalism. Thus the ‘gains’ achieved for LGBTIQ subjects— media, kinship (gay marriage, adoption), legality (sodomy), consumption (gay and lesbian tourism), must be read within the context of war on terror, the USA PATRIOT Act, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and unimpeded US imperialist expansion, as conservative victories at best, if at all” (Puar, 2006, p. 86).

Puar, along with the previous mentioned scholars, thus stress that Queer theories must take into consideration multiple intersectioning systems of oppression. Similar to the arguments before Cohen and Alimahomed also note a lack of intersectionality or a centering of whiteness in Queer Politics. For instance, Alimahomed’s 2010 research included interviewing 25 Latina and Asian/Pacific Islander women who identified as queer, lesbian, or bisexual at Gay Pride Events in Los Angeles and San Fransisco. In doing so, Alimahomed concluded, “Queer representation and expression in the LGBT movement has embodied a narrow, white racial frame in which queer Latinas and Asian/Pacific Islander women’s representations of themselves are often rendered invisible by the main- stream” (Alimahomed, 2010, p. 166). Understanding the lack of intersectionality in queer theories and the centering of whiteness in queer politics, Cohen therefore questioned the future of queer politics. Cohen says, “Recognizing the limits of current conceptions of queer identities and queer politics, I am interested in examining the concept of “queer” in order to think about how we might construct a new political identity that is truly liberating, transformative, and inclusive of all those who stand on the outside of the dominant constructed norm of state-sanctioned white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality. Such a broadened understanding of queerness must be based on an intersectional analysis that recognizes how numerous systems of oppression interact to regulate and police the lives of most people” (Cohen, 2005, p. 244).

Cohen’s thoughts on the future of queer politics thus relates to survey questions relating to Beloit College student’s experiences with Queer Politics/Theories. (Important Note:The majority of our survey respondents identified themselves as white. In addition, our survey did not require information about the survey participant’s socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, nationality, immigration status, and/or information on if the survey participant identified as cisgendered. In effect, these responses do not provide a wholistic picture if queer politics or thinking queerly at Beloit operates in a way that addresses multiple systems of oppression).

In your experiences has queer politics or thinking queerly been intersectional?

The majority of participants answered that it isn’t, is just at Beloit, that is focuses on whiteness or Western world ideas/ideologies too much, that it really depends on the person/who is engaging the conversation, that it attempts to be, and it can be if demanded so. Multiple responses did say “Yes”, but most of those responses still said that context matters.

In your experiences has thinking queerly or queer theories had the capacity to acknowledge all of your identities at one time (race/ethnicity, class, religion, ability, age, nationality, gender, sexual orientation)?

The majority of responses said no, maybe, or an extenuation of those responses. Respondents cited a lack of intersectionality in classroom/academic experiences/readings, a centering of white people in readings and class room discussions, and a lack of class room discussion/readings that allow people to discuss how their sexuality/gender is fluid and/or operates differently in different contexts. For responses that said yes, the majority of the responses also elaborated that they were white and/or that some of their other privileged identities affected their answering of this question. A few responses said they did not understand the question. Lastly, a response questioned queer theories capability of being intersectional when they are called queer theories.

Discussion Questions: How can we avoid centering whiteness and supporting homonationalism when thinking queerly at Beloit College? How do the responses relate to the scholars ideas up above and what Johnson specifically says about Quare? How would Puar interpret the survey responses?

Sources:

Alimahomed, S. (2010) Thinking outside the rainbow: women of color redefining queer politics and identity. Social Identities, 16(2), 151-168. DOI: 10.1080/13504631003688849

Cohen, C. (2005). “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Still Brave. NY, NY: Feminist Press, Pages 240-267.

Glick, E. F. (2003). Introduction: Defining Queer Ethnicities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10(1), 123-124. Duke University Press. Retrieved from Project MUSE database.

Johnson, P. (2005). “Quare” Studies Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother”. Black Queer Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Pages, 124-155.

Puar, J. (2006): Mapping US Homonormativities. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(1), 67-88. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663690500531014

Quiroga, J. (2003). From Republic to Empire: the Loss of Gay Studies. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10(1), 133-135. Retrieved frommuse.jhu.edu/article/49629.

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noisylibrary · 7 years ago

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Festival Concerts 2017

I saw a few shows this summer, here are my thoughts on my top ten shows (and a list of fifteen that were quite the treat nonetheless). Before I tell you why Russ didn’t make the cut, here’s a brief overview of the three festivals that I not only attended but experienced.

Ottawa Bluesfest: July 6-16th, 2017

Being an Ottawa native, Bluesfest is an event that continues to impress me and enlighten my musical tastes more than an event of this magnitude would be expected to. Despite its sometimes underwhelmed local youth attendees, the festival has been actively creating a more universal (or Canadian demographics based) line-up for the annual 10-day festival in early July. Since 2012 I have been attending the festival and learning and understanding the running trends, motives, and pillars of their organization. This year I was fortunate enough to be on a youth advisory group that sought feedback from young local music fans for line-up ideas, festival roll-out and welcomed the idea of future improvements to the already successful festival. This year’s line-up was a major success as you’ll see on my list.

Pukkelpop: August 16-19th, 2017

During my backpacking trip around Western Europe in August of this year, my friends Jack, Vinton, and Alex joined me in witnessing the most star-studded, exciting and inspiring music festival that I’ve ever attended. The stages, the amenities, the camping, the location, the short-lived relationships with other fans were all reasons to choose this (relatively cheap) 4-day musical event if the insane line-up wasn’t enough. The only thing that brought our overall experience down was our impressive spontaneity in planning our trip (or lack thereof). The initial appeal of the festival was the name of one specific band on all of our bucket lists, but as you’ll see in my list, there were several amazing reasons to travel almost 6,000 kilometers.

CityFolk: September 13th -17th, 2017

Short, sweet and stunning, the Ottawa CityFolk festival came back for a second year at the new Lansdowne Park venue with some bigger names and an overall better festival experience. Taking place on weeknights and weekend days, the Folk music category was thrown out the window once again in order to invite artists from all genres to entertain the eager Ottawa crowds.

10. Car Seat Headrest @ Pukkelpop

After seeing their name plastered around the online music community in indie/alternative publications and the live skate-punk scene, I was ashamed to admit that I had only found out about them after their 6th project, and what an album it was. Their 2016 release, “Teens of Denial” - the appropriate follow-up to “Teens of Style” was the main component of their live set at Pukkelpop in Hasselt, Belgium. Their setlist was a dream come true for a new (“fake”) fan like myself, which made the older songs that I had never heard so much more rewarding. Their dramatic range of alternative punk was a perfect fit for the setting of the tented stage on a breezy afternoon, a memorable set to say the least.

9. Sampha @ Pukkelpop

Keeping fans on their toes while alternating between infectious dance beats and somber ballads, London’s Sampha and his energetic “Club Stage” at Pukkelpop to compliment the Friday night with a stunning and immersive set. Comprised of his 2016 album ”Process” as well as cuts from his collaborations with Drake on songs like “4422” and “Too Much”, Sampha was moving the crowd’s hips to the songs more than they could sing along - but just barely. Transitioning from full band arrangements to solo piano performance to a Christmas tree-like drum kit that was surrounded by the band playing in unison, the performance elements extended far beyond the captivating sound that Sampha has become known for on his early work with SBTRKT, all the way to his newest full-length.

8. Father John Misty @ Ottawa CityFolk

Appealing to the majority of the crowd and surprising me, Josh Tillman (aka Father John Misty) delivered an extensive set list of songs with seldom politically infused speeches. The outspoken musical guru and intellectual sex god that is Father John Misty arrived in Ottawa in great spirits and with a surprising amount of energy from the get-go. This was one of those cliches that “sounded better than the recorded version” of classics from his 3 album discography. The former drummer of the Fleet Foxes made use of his powerful vocal range and took time on a few songs to incorporate his acoustic guitar for the eery-politically charged ballads of an adult version of angst. Appropriately matching his 2017 album Pure Comedy, the satirical and comedic elements of his charisma, presence and between-song monologues were part of a harmonious and cohesive motif that his persona has followed since day one. The setlist began with the majority of his new album in appropriate sequence with stunning visuals to reinforce and maybe piss off some Catholics and Taylor Swift fans, followed by a rejuvenated and remastered version of his fan favourites (OG fans unite). It definitely felt weird at times while standing up since the event felt like a comedic Broadway act, but the upside to this was that I got to sing along - and did I ever.

7. Parquet Courts @ Pukkelpop

Much like my relationship with Car Seat Headrest, the new york alternative post-punk outfit known as Parquet Courts had only entered my musical radar months before I saw them in Belgium. Listening to their most recent project, “Human Performance” made me instantly fall in love with their Sonic Youth-like sound and their Fleetwood Mac-like versatility. Their live set incorporated this and expanded on it with efficacy...and so much shredding. Toggling back and forth between their Andrew Savage led punk songs and Austin Brown’s indie/post-punk songs provided a sort of dialogue that demonstrated their craftsmanship as musicians and a motif of torn ideals that backs the majority of their work. Their cohesive and energetic playing style was unlike any contemporaries in the genre, a trait that allowed jazz-inspired solo sections but remained focused on the gorgeous unified sound throughout their set.

6. BadBadNotGood @ Pukkelpop

When four 20-year-olds from Toronto casually walk onto the stage, what do you expect? Well, you’re wrong cause they’re insane. The infamous contemporary jazz band that regularly collaborates within the hip-hop community are poised with their playing ability and humility above all else. Their late afternoon set at Pukkelpop was my second time seeing the quartet in concert. The modern and fresh jazz sound that’s fused with funk transitions and hip-hop structures leaves a haunting negative space that has featured rappers like Ghostface Killah, MF Doom, Mick Jenkins and many more, a facet not explored live but indicative of their progressive take on jazz. Featuring brass invitees and a vocal performance by Charlotte Day Wilson, the band delivered a relentless set of their classics and in jazz fashion, virtuosic solo elements. Although my bias for the overall enjoyment of the show stems from my pre-existing love for jazz and knowledge of the band’s discography, the energy, pace and presentation of their live set is a treat for music lovers from any realm.

5. LCD Soundsystem @ Ottawa Bluesfest

Imagine first, a disco hall, with a Boiler Room level DJ, and a Rolling Stones level charisma on stage. Back from the dead for the second year in a row, LCD Soundsystem ventured out to Ottawa to throttle the crowd with their cult known classics and some cuts from their 2017 release “American Dream”. The gradual dynamic builds, full band chants and ambience that they achieved was nothing less than a musical trance, which is just about as immersive you can get with a single tempo. The danger in a musical trance is not the trance itself, but the failure to realize that you’re in it. Notorious for their dance-pop songs that double the average single length, the performance of their discography makes for a beautiful encounter with a version of you that instinctively dances. I could not stop dancing, notable because the band consistently grapples with the same occurrence at all of their live shows. Both times that I’ve seen them play, it has felt like my insane enjoyment of the set was a close second behind the band themselves. Make sure that you see them live if you can, or listen to their music if you have enough energy to dance for 7+ minutes.

4. Denzel Curry @ Pukkelpop

While making this list -between pacing back and forth across the room- I struggled with the ranking of this show for a few reasons. I had a very limited background on Carol City, Florida’s Denzel Curry, but I knew that he was the very definition of aggression. It has been 3 months and I’m still experiencing the biblical moshpits and radical energy from within the stage tent. It was insane. Powering through his well known verses on songs like “Ultimate”, “Gook” and “Ult.” to name only a few, Curry bombarded the crowd with stanzas filled with 16th note runs without missing a word. Song after song, the cohesion between Curry’s DJ and the rapper himself was unheard of. Experimenting on acapella sections with a gorgeous flow and glorious punches by his DJ, POSTranaut, Curry kept his violent gaze on the crowd leaving the fans (me) terrified at how amazed they (I) were (was). His persona alone influenced the raging yet amicable crowd to go absolutely bonkers, but his explicit directions to “open that pit”, turned the energy up to 12. Although I was mentally ready when entering the tented stage at Pukkelpop, the multitude of hip-hop shows that I’ve seen were all tame in comparison. I would suggest spending a great deal of money in order to see Denzel Curry, but make sure you can afford a riot shield if you plan on getting near the stage.

3. Solange @ Pukkelpop

This is how you make a grown man cry. Solange Knowles -yes, the sister- came back in 2016 with her full length album “A Seat At The Table”, and brought it with all of its glory to Pukkelpop to close the first night of the festival. Playing the majority of her 2016 release as well as some picks from her debut EP “True”, Solange and her wonderfully attired band graced the stage with infectious sounds and beautifully choreographed dancing. Wearing all red outfits, the 9 piece band must have walked off the stage of Motown before delivering this incredible set in front of thousands of amazed fans in Belgium. Even in this small town outside of Brussels, no language barrier seemed to be present during her sing-along songs like “Cranes in the Sky” and “Don’t Touch My Hair”. Every direction I looked around in the crowd had people in this flimsy, yet groovy trance of soul, jazz and gospel. The event was holy to say the least. Check out my review of “A Seat at The Table” on the blog!

2. Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals @ Ottawa Bluesfest

On the rainiest night of Bluesfest, fans gathered around the Claridge Homes stage at Bluesfest for a treat announced only weeks before the festival begun. As the band entered the stage to become acquainted with the crowd, all eyes were scoping the stage for the biggest smile and the shortest man. Looking like Stevie Wonder with shorter hair, yelling like Otis Redding on an intro, Anderson .Paak took to the stage without introduction or hesitation. Performing a wide collection of songs from “Venice”, “Malibu” and “Yes Lawd”, .Paak and The Free Nationals proved that anyone in the crowd could move to their music without even hearing it before. The virtuosity that .Paak achieves was evenly distributed between his drum solos, and his stage front dominance as a vocalist. The sudden and effective changes of pace that were led by .Paak was beyond remarkable, and at times during the set you could see members of The Free Nationals pausing to drop their jaw to the floor for a quick second between his drum fills. Aggressive yet heartfelt was the resulting emotion, leaving some fans in tears while some were off crowd-surfing into alternate universes.

1. Death Grips @ Pukkelpop

Notorious for the uncertainties that they give their fans (and festival organizers), the lead-up to their set was beyond stressful for the super fan that I am. Their antics have become loved by many including myself, but travelling halfway across the world for their show was beginning to feel like the biggest gamble of all time. If this isn’t making any sense, feel free to take a second to read my topic piece on the branding of Death Grips to get a sense of their slight insanity. From the dark corners of the musical internet, the core fans of the Californian trio emerged to camp out by the stage in preparation for this show. No one was truly prepared though. Some fans that we had the chance to meet before the show mentioned that this wasn’t their first time seeing them, but there was an appropriate fear in their eyes when the surrounding fans started packing in tighter as the sky got darker. A children’s drum set was the first thing to enter the stage and get set up by a single stage tech. Who knows what was going on by that point. At this point, it was hard to tell what was part of the show and what was soundcheck? (Are they going to do a Soundcheck)? Drum mic checks were done on this tiny little kit, and an abrasive sound was emanating from behind the stage’s backdrop. An emotion that felt very similar to my first encounter with their music was coming on, and I was more than excited. I was terrified. Three men who looked like the distinguishable band members walked onto the stage with hoods on and a slouched posture. Taking little to no direction from the stage tech, they began musically destroying the instruments for a soundcheck? It was them. After their half song sound-check and a short while later, the lights went down and a flickering purple screen was on at full intensity to welcome the band back. They delivered a lump-sum of their most aggressive and well known songs without any introduction, any pauses, any sips of water, any glances at the crowd and not a single light directed at their faces. Improvised synth sections and military drumming alongside the poetic gospel that was screamed into the mic was nothing short of musical ecstasy, and it never missed a beat. The three silhouettes who I can only assume were MC Ride, Andy Morin and Zack Hill, brought everyone within a mile of the stage to a new level of “Tarab” for over an hour. The adrenaline that they gave me was beyond any musical experience that I’ve ever had up until that point, and I don’t imagine that it will be matched until I see them again.

Although the full list of shows includes more than 25, do you really care about how I enjoyed Russ?

11. Preoccupations @ Pukkelpop

12. Mac Demarco @ Pukkelpop

13. Post Malone @ Ottawa CityFolk

14. Lil Yachty @ Ottawa Bluesfest

15. Migos @ Ottawa Bluesfest & @ Pukkelpop

16. Flaming Lips @ Pukkelpop

17. Night Lovell @ Ottawa Bluesfest

18. Cashmere Cat @ Pukkelpop

19. Flume @ Ottawa Bluesfest & @ Pukkelpop

20. The Shins @ Pukkelpop

21. Phantogram @ Ottawa Bluesfest

22. London Grammar @ Pukkelpop

23. Oliver Heldens @ Pukkelpop

24. Anna of The North @ Pukkelpop

25. Death From Above 1979 @ Ottawa Bluesfest

Now that there’s some sporadic snow flying around, what acts are you impatient to see during next summer’s festival season?

What were your favourites this summer?

Thanks to Vinton and Jack for the pictures!

-C

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